Cinema and the Audiovisual Imagination: Music, Image, Sound 9780755603619

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To Claudette

First published in 2015 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd www.ibtauris.com Distributed worldwide by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd Registered office: 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU c Robert Robertson Copyright  The right of Robert Robertson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of the Moving Image 24 ISBN: 978 178076 717 8 eISBN: 978 0 85773 609 3 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by Aptara Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

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Cover photograph: Robert Robertson, the snow-beach from The River That Walks (2002).

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List of Illustrations

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Cover photograph: Robert Robertson, the snow-beach from The River That Walks (2002) ‘A new world of form opens up inevitably.’ Morning fishermen. Fishing, morning. ‘Heads without necks’. Music from the ‘evolution’ scene, Act 2, Scene 2. Music with different timelines, Act 1, Scene 4. Dance music, Act 2, Scene 1. Chorus of Lives, beginning. Chorus of Lives, end. Image from Act 2, Scene 1. A solitary family. The fur trader James McGill. The snow-boat. Montage sketches for the Olympic section. The head of a black panther. Images in frost suggest plant life. Something extraordinary happens every winter. Audiovisual interaction.

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Acknowledgements At I.B.Tauris I would like to thank my editors Anna Coatman and Lisa Goodrum, and also Philippa Brewster who has wholeheartedly supported this project from its inception. In addition I would like to thank Rhidian Davis at the British Film Institute, Anne and Michel Fuchs, Jeff Higley at the Landscape and Arts Network, Professor Marielle Nitoslawska at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in Montreal, Professor Fr´ed´eric Og´ee at the Department of English Studies at the Universit´e de Paris Diderot, Larry Sider and Diane Freeman at The School of Sound in Oxford, Professor Murray Smith from the School of Arts at the University of Kent, Maggie McCarthy at the Ocatillo Arts Group, Louise Harnby, and Gary Tamanian. And I give special thanks to my fellow artists and friends Nick Collins, Dennis Dracup, Spike Hawkins, Maureen Kendal, Chris Lynn, Susana Medina, Derek Ogbourne and Jill Rock. My final and special thanks go to my wife Claudette, who has helped me with every stage of the preparation of this book for publication. She gave me invaluable feedback about the texts, copy-edited them and provided me with excellent advice both about the contents and the computer programmes I used. Together we can achieve anything.

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Preface This is not one of those books In which I state what I will write about, write that I’m writing about it, and to conclude, write about what I have written. It’s a book for those who are ready to explore ideas without being told what they will read, what they are reading, and what to conclude. It’s a book for those who think for themselves. Robert Robertson

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Introduction I have just read a marvellous short text by Albert Camus – I have never come across it before. It is called Retour a` Tipasa, ‘Return to Tipasa’. As a young man Camus had known a magical place by the sea, about 70 kilometres from Algiers. In the dazzling morning light he would wander through an ancient ruined and forgotten city with its columns and mosaics, amidst the smell of absinthe bushes, tamarisks, with the ecstatic song of birds, the stridulation of cicadas. This freshness, this sense of freedom, after the dark years of World War II, was a sensual joy he yearned to recapture. So he returned to Tipasa, but found it sodden with rain, the ruins now surrounded by barbed wire, protected by an official guard. His youthful memory, and its luminosity and beauty which had protected him from moments of despair, had disappeared. It had been a mistake to return: the innocence in that first love had been lost in the collapse of empires and the violence of war. But this experience of loss made him realise, during the ensuing years, that nothing valid is gained through the relentless process of exclusion. He had found in himself an inability to exclude his original experience, and its negation. So, two decades after his initial epiphany, as someone who could evidently not recapture what he had once been at 20, he returned to Tipasa a second time. Again the continuous rain, again the allencompassing grey. But then the rain stopped, giving way to a radiant 1

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freshly washed morning light. He finds a way through the barbed wire, and steps into the ancient ruined city. The morning holds its breath, the sun is still for an immeasurable instant. Then, in this silence and light, his years of fury and darkness slowly dissolve. Gradually he becomes aware of the sound of birds, the breathing of the sea, the surreptitious skitterings of lizards. Then there is an explosion of the songs of birds – ecstatic, discordant, delighting in the light. And within he feels waves of delight rising, an instant of freshness, of the new, which from then on would appear and disappear, but would never really end. Most of us have probably experienced this sensation, in some form or another; it may have been caused by music, a person, or a painting. In my case, the experience of Camus at Tipasa, a place full of light, newness and freshness, an internal source of strength in difficult times, is very close to my early encounter with the life and ideas of Sergei Eisenstein, film and theatre director, graphic artist, teacher and theorist of cinema. For me, Eisenstein’s ideas have the same sense of newness. Against a background of official exclusion and ignorance, his ideas are refreshing and always provide new insights, new perspectives. For Naum Kleiman and his Russian film specialist colleagues, ‘Eisenstein made it possible to discover lots of people: Jean Renoir, John Ford, Orson Welles, Satyajit Ray. He was in dialogue with them. He also connected us to Peking opera, Kabuki theatre, Melville, Freud, James Joyce, Greek art. Everything. It was through Eisenstein that we discovered the world.’1 During my first five years of humanities studies at university, Eisenstein had only existed in the form of The Battleship Potemkin when it featured in student film society screenings. So when I found Yon Barna’s biography of Eisenstein it was like an explosion in the mind. Here was an artist who had a passionate curiosity about Chinese, Japanese, African-American and Mexican cultures, but who also knew about Piranesi and J.S. Bach; I was also passionately drawn to these areas. But the range of his enthusiasms and knowledge was so extensive, that more than 30 years after that first true encounter, I still discover nearly every day something new to me through Eisenstein’s explorations.

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INTRODUCTION

The texts in this book are divided into two kinds: the first set of texts is about the audiovisual in a wide variety of films, by filmmakers both known and less known. The second set of texts explores the audiovisual in Empedocles and in my music/film Oserake and The River That Walks. Like Eisenstein on the Audiovisual, this book’s structure follows Eisenstein’s idea of the ‘spherical book’. This approach actively encourages the reader to be creative, to be free to make all kinds of connections, like mental hyperlinks, between various parts of the book. For example, a link can be made between why Pasolini and a very different film director, Busby Berkeley, decided to use only one camera when they shot their films, and the statement that ‘we need analogies as anchors in the chaos of vast numbers of choices’ in the text ‘Thinking about Digital Thinking’. What is attractive about Eisenstein’s idea of the ‘spherical book’ is that readers will make connections never dreamed of by the author. In conclusion I would like to propose the concept of an ‘audiovisual lens’. Even today, when we have the technology to make films where music, sound and the visual can be treated with equal importance, films are still largely studied only in terms of their visual dimension. As a composer of operas and music/films, in my work the visual and the sonic have always been intertwined, from the beginning. To express this I’d like to choose the image of a lens (where the optical dimension dominates) and to transform it, so that it includes the sonic dimension: an audiovisual lens. This image represents a way of focussing, of perceiving, in which the interaction of music, the visual and sound are inextricably interwoven, as in life, and as in these texts.

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1 Do the Eisenstein Thing The Audiovisual in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989) What, one might ask, has Spike Lee in common with Eisenstein, the director of The Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible? Lee is also a teacher of film, so it’s very likely that he refers to Eisenstein’s work. However, here I’m interested in the connection between Eisenstein’s ideas on the audiovisual and Spike Lee’s ‘joint’, Do The Right Thing. Eisenstein wrote more about the audiovisual than any other practitioner, as far as I know. But he doesn’t give us a single precise definition of the word ‘audiovisual’. So I’ll give you my definition: the audiovisual is the interaction of music, image and sound. From this definition (which I derived from Eisenstein’s writings on the audiovisual) it is clear that the audiovisual doesn’t only apply to cinema; it also applies to opera, theatre, dance and multimedia. Once, Eisenstein wrote about opera as an excellent model for how to use music in a film. He referred to places where music and dance are integral to the culture where the action is set, cultures which are also interesting as they are themselves the product of a mix of other cultures: Eisenstein criticised the forced naturalism of Western opera and the use of music in the narrative of the sound film, when it would be introduced

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with such phrases as “‘Why don’t you sing something?” or “Ah, here come the villagers – they are going to dance for the Count.”’ He felt that a much more organic way of combining music, theatre and dance could be achieved in operas which would be set in societies where music and dance are an integral part of everyday life, as in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, or the Ukraine. And he saw such a synthesis as having immeasurably greater potential in cinema.1

This is why, having worked in both opera and film, when I came across Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989), I found it not only a gripping, ‘no holds barred’ portrait of racism in a black neighbourhood in New York, but a wonderfully effective use of audiovisual filmmaking, which arises directly out of his subject. Big cities grow from villages, and in countries where there’s a mix of cultures, this mix is reflected in the villages, or neighbourhoods. Often one culture dominates, so you’ll have Little Italy (in New York and Montreal), Chinatown (New York, Los Angeles and London), and Little Haiti in Miami. Other communities and cultural influences are sometimes also present, so that in Little Haiti, for example, you have the influence of French culture, a legacy of French colonialism. In Spike Lee’s film Do The Right Thing, the hybridisation of cultures is immediately there, at the beginning.2 We see and hear Tina, a young Puerto Rican woman dancing to an African-American rap, ‘Fight The Power,’ performed by Public Enemy, and specially commissioned by Spike Lee as an ‘anthem’ for his film.3 This beginning appears rather long, as it’s not in a normal naturalistic style, and there’s no attempt at any naturalistic realism. Effectively here Spike Lee has a music video! It’s not a narrative or plot device, it’s an audiovisual image which states all the main themes in the film we are about to see and hear. In musical terms it’s like an overture before an opera, and we shall hear this music in different contexts throughout the film. So the theme of a mix of cultures is stated, using music and dance: a Puerto Rican dancing to an African-American rap. Dance and music, integral to African, Caribbean and African-American cultures, are used to express the frustrations and sense of injustice due to the racism in American and (by implication) other cultures.

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The very lack of everyday realism at the beginning of the film immediately makes these powerful meanings possible, directly transmitting them to the audience. Then there’s the theme of the colour red and red/orange: Tina’s red boxing gloves, her red dress, her red lipstick, the red/orange light on the buildings. This is how Spike Lee evokes for us the hottest day of the year, when at over ninety degrees the murder rate rises: these colours are associated with relentless heat.4 They appear in multiple ways: in clothes, on buildings, in the colour of the light; these things give a powerful sense of an oppressive heat-wave in the city. Behind Tina we see a montage of huge photos which evokes the atmosphere of the streets of Brooklyn, the location of the BedfordStuyvesant neighbourhood. Lee realised that he had to shoot Do The Right Thing on location – the music and action emerge directly from this cityscape and the way its inhabitants react with it and with each other; Lee also used local people as extras. The resulting emotional and expressive dimension would have not been there in Do The Right Thing had it been filmed in a Hollywood studio lot. After Tina’s ‘music video’ we are introduced audiovisually to Mr Se˜nor Love Daddy; ‘Mr Se˜nor’ – another indicator of hybrid culture. We first see him in a close-up of his mouth – his voice is his identity and his means of earning a living: he’s the community’s DJ. He is important in a culture where oral expression is prized; a griot figure, he is in the tradition of the West African griots, the poet historians who provide music to the community, as well as a sense of balance and worldly wisdom. Also, the sense of humour from that tradition is there. Spike Lee shows it in the ‘platters’ reflected in Love Daddy’s sunglasses, as if his eyes are music (the platters are actually reflections of a hat, but you don’t notice that when you’re watching the film normally). And he plays different styles of music for the different cultures and generations in the community; part of his repertoire is scat-style singing. We see ‘Da Mayor’, the older father figure, struggling to get up in the already torrid morning, accompanied by the patter of Love Daddy on the radio. Then there’s an extreme low-angle shot of Smiley, the adult-child, whose painfully stammered statements about oppression are extended

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in the oppressive symmetry of the orange buildings which rise tall behind him. All these are solos: – – – –

Tina’s solo dance, in the beginning of the film the musical speech of Mr Se˜nor Love Daddy the grunts of Da Mayor the exhausting stammering utterings of Smiley.

Immediately Spike Lee puts us in a space which is beyond simple narrative. This is cinema where dance and music are equal partners to the visual track. This can also be seen and heard in a scene featuring the Italian Americans: Sal and his two sons, Pino and Vito, as they arrive at their pizzeria. As in opera, including Italian opera, you have solos, duets and trios, even vocal quartets. These are musical and emotional structures, and you get them in jazz too. Here it’s a trio, with a dance of Italian American gesture and body language. Next, we have two duets and another trio. The first duet features Da Mayor and Mother Sister. Their age is gently mirrored in the score for strings, in a vaguely and slightly dissonant, possibly drunken, ragtime style, which accompanies their dialogue. It’s the second duet between Tina and her mother that made me realise the musicality of the spoken word in this film. You can no longer understand the words; the two women’s voices become united in a counterpoint of rage and frustration. There’s no music for the female duet: there’s no need for it, the music is already there. It is also there in the trio of older men which follows. The wall behind them was painted specially; it’s not just a colour, it’s the theme or leitmotif of heat. It’s also a harmony which links the three voices in this jazz-like improvisation of three men shooting the breeze. You watch the whole action in a three-shot, like watching a jazz trio interact. Eisenstein’s approach to the audiovisual is related to his sensitivity to colour and texture, as well as to the nature of colour itself. He points out that colour in nature has an ‘indefinite status quo’; it only

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acquires meaning and expression through ‘the conscious and volitional impulse in the one who uses it’. For this reason the use of colour in cinema is of primary importance. In a film, colour behaves like music or sound, in that it is an abstraction from nature, which through its powers of association can be mobilised by the artist to create meaning and expression.5 Earlier I mentioned the leitmotif. Eisenstein borrowed the leitmotif idea from the influential composer of music-dramas, Richard Wagner. Wagner used what he called leitmotifs to underline links between developments in the action. Leitmotifs are usually brief musical themes, harmonies or rhythms which are associated with a character or an object (like a sword or a ring). The leitmotifs are instantly recognised by the audience, who therefore become aware of an evolving ‘inner drama’. Eisenstein applied Wagner’s leitmotif idea to colour: the theme expressed in colour leitmotifs can, through its colour score and with its own means, unfold an inner drama, weaving its own pattern in the contrapuntal whole, crossing and recrossing the course of action.6

Apart from the red-orange colour, one of the leitmotifs in Do The Right Thing is musical style itself, emblematic of the difference in cultures within the neighbourhood. Next we experience an actual duel of musical styles, resulting in rhythmic and tonal dissonances, of a kind the American composer Charles Ives explored in his polystylistic music. First we hear a Latin salsa dance, and we see a group of LatinAmerican men sitting on a stoop, a chorus talking simultaneously about salsa, as they listen to Rub´en Blades on their radio. Then Radio Raheem appears, inseparable from his boom-box, with his rap combining dissonantly, uneasily with the salsa dance music. Then there’s a duet between Mookie (played by Spike Lee) and Vito, then Mookie and Buggin Out. This last interaction is a relatively peaceful transition to another conflict, between a white American man who has just bought a house in the neighbourhood, and a chorus of African-Americans, including a Puerto Rican girl. Here there are two soloists, Clifton the white man 9

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and Buggin Out, interacting with a chorus. The audiovisual editing here is rhythmically timed to perfection. The first conflict is musical joust; the second conflict is a rhythmic battle of musical words and shouts. Another musical conflict takes place in the sequence with the water hydrants. As people dance ecstatically in the cooling sprays to reggae music, Radio Raheem appears, with his serious rap in stark contrast with these moments of carefree sensual delight. This ecstatic sequence with the water hydrants has its tragic counterpart at the end of the film, when the firemen turn their water-hoses on the crowd – bringing to mind the powerful water-hose sequence in Eisenstein’s The Strike (1925). It’s worth mentioning at this point Spike Lee’s use of types: Radio Raheem, Sal, his sons Pino and Vito, Buggin Out, Mookie, Mother Sister, Da Mayor, Mr Se˜nor Love Daddy, Smiley. Each one represents a set of values, an approach to everyday life; each one has their own gestures, a unique style of vocal delivery, and, in this sense, their own music. But Radio Raheem is often silent – his voice is the rap music from his ‘boom-box’. His obsessive playing of the same music has a parallel in Smiley’s frustrated repetitive stutter, which in itself mirrors his repetitive account of the civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Eisenstein selected his actors according to the ideas their appearance suggested to audiences7 – he called this technique ‘typage’. Eisenstein derived ‘typage’ from the thought of the German philosopher Friedrich Schopenhauer (1788–1860). Schopenhauer believed that ‘an idea expressed in its completeness is photogenic; in other words something is photogenic when it corresponds most closely to the idea that it embodies.’ Eisenstein adapted this concept to his portrayal of people, as well as objects. This approach can produce a cinema of ideas, rather than just an admiration of celebrity and glamour. Spike Lee uses ‘typage’ too. In his commentary on his film, Lee asks, ‘What’s the difference between Hollywood characters and my characters?’ He then answers his own question by stating his conviction that the characters in his film are ‘true’. By this affirmation he is making clear to us that they are not like the fake representations imagined by

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those who know nothing about black people other than the stereotypes with which they have grown up when watching Hollywood movies. His use of ‘typage’ also encourages the expression of ideas and values, of the conflicts which lead to the explosive conclusion of his film. We experience one of these conflicts in part of a duet between Mookie and Pino, in which Pino refuses to acknowledge that the African-American celebrities he admires so much are actually black. This is followed by a montage of solos to camera. Here Spike Lee uses typage to communicate directly to us a range of racist stereotypes, which by this method he brings out into the open. This succession of explosive and racist rants is concluded by a call for tolerance and peaceful coexistence from Mr Se˜nor Love Daddy, the neighbourhood’s DJ, who underlines his point by propelling himself rapidly towards us, on his wheeled office chair, in a reverse mechanical equivalent of a ‘zooming in’ shot. This montage of bigotry, of stereotypical ideas, merges with the musical styles, as in the conflict we saw earlier between the LatinAmerican group and Radio Raheem. Later, Radio Raheem passes the trio of three men sitting in front of the red wall: they object to the rap music coming from his radio, it doesn’t appeal to their generation. And lastly, in an atmosphere electric with tension, the most serious conflict is also set off by a reaction to the rap on Raheem’s boom-box, by Sal in his pizzeria; a violent reaction which ultimately leads to Radio Raheem’s death at the hands of the racist police. The entire film is a complex audiovisual weave of visual and musical accents: of camera angles, often tilted like a visual syncopation; audiovisual editing emphasising solos, choruses, movement and conversation – of sequences which are truly audiovisual pieces, composed, improvised like jazz, with a combination, as in jazz and other African styles, of improvisation and precision. Eisenstein is not interested in invisible editing, the idea that good camera work is unobtrusive. He does not aim to be an invisible director: in a good colour film the spectator should be aware of colour, and the music or sounds used should be consciously audible. He does not believe in ‘invisible’ colour or ‘inaudible’ music. He thought that such techniques

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are just abrogations of artistic responsibility in the practice of making films. They demonstrate a director’s inability to be creative in the face of the wide possibilities afforded by the variety of expressive means available in the organic audiovisual.8

I mentioned earlier that Spike Lee’s use of a non-naturalistic approach to film produces an audiovisual stylisation which releases cinema as an effective expressive medium. It’s a way to show us the neighbourhood’s culture and how it functions in its variety of intonations, gestures, sounds, musical styles and dynamism. Ernest Dickerson, the director of photography, points out in the commentary on the film that he admires cinematographers like Jack Cardiff and Vittorio Storaro, who were more concerned with expressive force, about ‘getting some emotional response out of the audience’, rather than creating a make-believe reality. This idea of ‘getting some emotional response out of the audience’, and not being too concerned about creating reality, very much relates to the pre-cinematic forms of theatre and music. Dickerson also comments about the theatrical lighting Lee used in Do The Right Thing. This visual technique derived from theatre was a conscious stylisation to stimulate in the cinema audience a sense of oppressive heat, and in turn to highlight a general sense of frustration and oppression in that community. Then there’s the musicality of the film. Bill Lee, Spike Lee’s father, composed the music for several of his son’s films, including this one. As well as being a composer, he was also a bass player who performed with Harry Belafonte, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Simon and Garfunkel, and other well-known musicians. So he’s a composer familiar with a variety of musical styles, ideal in a film composer, and also for opera: he’s also an opera composer. But the music doesn’t stop with the music: it’s also in the film editing. And the editing is part of the acting, the gestures, the dance at the beginning, the camera angles, the camera distances, the lenses, the use of colour. This music of editing is to do with precision timing. Precision timing is a quality that the great Russian theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold thought was vital. Meyerhold was Eisenstein’s theatre teacher. He was

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Meyerhold admired the split-second timing of Black ensembles he had seen in Berlin in 1925, and in Moscow early in 1926. He described one dance where each performer began one second after the other, and where all aspects of the performance were built on syncopation: he said ‘we have to take lessons from them . . . it’s monstrously difficult.’9

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trained as a musician and he complained that his actors lacked a sense of timing.

Eisenstein was very much aware of the ways in which various media in film overlapped, crossed, merged and developed their own interweaving lines, as in counterpoint in music. For him there are three lines of development for the audiovisual filmmaker to consider: the line of object representations (in other words, the visual track), of music and of colour. To these three lines Eisenstein adds two more independent lines of sound, for dialogue, and sound effects. So in this analogy there are at least five lines of possible independent development in an audiovisual film, not counting the separate lines in a musical score.10

Cinema is a relatively recent invention compared to theatre, music and dance, but its roots in these older media are easily discernible, especially in audiovisual cinema, as in Do The Right Thing, where there’s a complete unity of theatre, gesture, music and dance. The pioneers of European opera looked to the theatre of ancient Greece as a model for this multimedia unity for their new form of performance. Spike Lee’s film Do The Right Thing follows Aristotle’s Unities of Time, Place and Action: the idea that for theatre to be really effective, the action portrayed in the play has to happen in the same location over a period of 24 hours. And the complete unity of music, theatre and dance I mentioned earlier is also found in the African theatre tradition. And both ancient Greek theatre and African theatre have their roots in religious ceremonies featuring music, theatre and dance. Finally we have the catastrophe at the end of Do The Right Thing. And, amidst the violence there is no music. 13

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Eisenstein explains how at extreme points in a work of art, a point where there is a sudden change to something very different, there’s a leap to another dimension. In this case the music leaps into the form of noise: a composition of cries, shouts, sirens, the noise of fire and the New York fire trucks – moments of silence and dramatic stasis, preceding each successive explosion. Spike Lee emphasises the explosions by repetition: for example when Mookie smashes a front window of Sal’s restaurant by throwing a trashcan through it. This shattering is filmed first from the outside of the pizzeria, then quickly repeated in a shot from the inside. This audiovisual technique evokes the reflex repetition of a traumatic moment, as we try to engage our reason about what has just happened. The ending of this scene of catastrophe, in total darkness and silence, exactly follows Eisenstein’s technique of proceeding by opposites. Spike Lee finishes with the most extreme opposition that is possible – for maximum emotional effect. Smiley’s wailing is a solo, which is integral to the composition of the noise for this scene. It’s a highly effective contrast, in terms of a lonely voice separate from the crowd, a desolate moment. Then there’s the strange groaning sound: in such chaotic situations we may not always know where a disturbing sound like this comes from. Eisenstein points out that we should not actually see the boot which creaks as the man approaches. Instead, the camera should be on the face of the person who fears the approach of the boot, which creaks ominously out of shot.11 Here we see the anxious face of Da Mayor, and eventually we see that it’s Mother Sister who is the person who is groaning and distraught with grief. These are examples of powerful audiovisual editing, timed with great precision, as in a highly expressive piece of music.

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2 Double Echoes: Music and Sound in David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) You’ve gotta really fall in deep to go to this place where you catch ideas . . . if you suddenly drop through a trapdoor into the big idea bank, then you’ve got a thing happening. 1

Doubles and uncertain spaces The idea of the double permeates Lost Highway. It is a theme encountered repeatedly in tales of mystery, and it plays on a number of anxieties. As Edgar Allan Poe explores in his story William Wilson, the double undermines our sense of self and our sense of everyday realities. The hero of his story describes the mysterious spaces of the boarding school where he is a student: It was difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be . . . I was never able to ascertain with precision, in what remote locality lay the little sleeping apartment assigned to myself and some eighteen or twenty other scholars.

Part of the strangeness in the interview of Fred and Ren´ee by the two policemen in the first part of Lost Highway is caused by the 15

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uncertainty the couple appear to have regarding the location of their bedroom in their house. This surreal anxiety inevitably has vaguely sexual overtones, and initiates the theme of the double in the film. In this case a double and uncertain space heightens the troubling spatial ambiguity of the house and the corresponding mysteries buried in the relationship between the apparently normal couple. Fred meets the androgynous Mystery Man at a party, and is understandably deeply disturbed that this strange-looking person is simultaneously standing in front of him, as well as ringing him from his (Fred’s) house. The Mystery Man is spatially and sexually ambiguous – in both senses he occupies two spaces at once, and is an excellent example of how the ambivalence of the double has a power beyond everyday normality, which creates considerable anxiety. Then there are the two men, Fred and Pete, and the two women, Ren´ee and Alice. Lynch has both of these female roles performed by Patricia Arquette, making the characters of the two male leads also echo each other. Are they really the same character played by two people? Are Ren´ee and Alice really two different people? These kinds of ambiguities are used by Bu˜nuel in his last film That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), where two different actresses play the same role in different parts of the film. And Hitchcock in Vertigo features two apparently different women played by the same actress. It’s a technique which depends on the echo, and it relates to the idea that a personality is not just one persona. In turn this idea relates to the nature of acting itself, where someone becomes another person, who may or may not have aspects of the actor’s original personality. In addition in Lost Highway there’s the double echo between the couple Fred and Ren´ee in the first part and the couple Pete and Alice in the second part of the film. Another example of the echo structure is found in the symmetrical tailgate section, where Mr Eddy is tailgated, then tailgates the tailgater. Lynch also plays with echoes when he features films within his film: the house on the videocassette and the same house in the film; the pornography in the video, and the lovemaking in the film. Each videocassette of Fred and Ren´ee’s house becomes an increasingly disturbing and distorted echo of the first video. In overall formal terms, the second part of the film inevitably acts as an echo to the first part. In addition the film ends with high-speed driving on the highway at

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Echoes of the avant-garde Lynch carries across the device of the double and the echo for the sounds for the entire film. He fed sounds into tubes of various sizes (retrieved from a building site), as well as into a large empty wine bottle, and recorded them. He found that the resulting sounds were much richer than those produced through digital reverberation. These musical techniques, which were developed in the 1950s with musique concr`ete, involved the analogue manipulation of sounds using early tape recorder technology. At times Lynch combined these sounds with various unusual instrumental combinations, where the musicians were using what he calls ‘strange ways’ of playing their instruments.2 In Western Europe, composers like Boulez, Xenakis and Stockhausen introduced such new instrumental combinations and innovative performance techniques, derived from the first electronic music, during the 1950s and 1960s. However in the Soviet-bloc countries at this time, composers like Penderecki and Lutoslawski from Poland, and Ligeti from Hungary, had less freedom to explore sounds in electronic music studios, but they compensated by experimenting with these electronically derived methods, to introduce a new world of sound to the traditional orchestra. Lynch especially admires Penderecki’s music from this period. The sounds which he describes as producing a ‘modern noir kind of feel’ in Lost Highway can in part be traced to these techniques in avant-garde music. These methods are probably also related to his enthusiasm for the Eastern bloc orchestral sound: ‘there’s nothing like an orchestra in Prague! There’s something about the Eastern European thing that blows through the music.’3 Though Lynch makes use of digital technology to record and layer analogue sounds and experiment with them rapidly and efficiently, his attitude to sounds of digital origin appears to be the same as his attitude to digitally manipulated images: they lack nuance and ambiguity. He asks whether the computer generated image is ‘going to look like plastic next to beautiful wood’.4

DOUBLE ECHOES: MUSIC AND SOUND IN DAVID LYNCH’S LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

night, which matches symmetrically the beginning of the film, together with the song ‘I’m Deranged’ sung by David Bowie.

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Setting the scene audiovisually Lynch sets the mood of his film from the opening credit sequence, with three simultaneous levels of movement: 1. The fast pace on the highway at night, from the point of view of the driver. There’s a sense of darkness, speed and danger, as it’s clear from the road markings that the car is hurtling down the middle of the highway. 2. The relatively slow pulse in ‘I’m Deranged,’ the song by David Bowie and Brian Eno, which is quite varied in texture compared to the monotony of the faster pulse of the broken centre lines of the highway markings. 3. The credits which race towards you from the darkness ahead, pause to be read, then rush forwards into your eyes, seeming to shatter behind you, as if you had driven into them. This is an aggressive, almost 3-D effect, which heightens the sense of driving recklessly at a high speed. At the same time there’s a sense of elation, as we drive through these sign-like obstacles which have no effect on us or on our speed, and we wonder how this effect is achieved. The slow pulse of ‘I’m Deranged’ is contrasted with the fast tempo of the central lines on the highway, to produce a hypnotic effect. This is the result of the combination of a slow musical pulse which acts in synaesthetic counterpoint to the fast pulse of the highway. There is also a fast percussive beat in the song which makes an effective rhythmic counterpoint with the fast pulse of the broken centre lines on the road. The almost complete absence of any naturalistic noise from the car heightens these audiovisual counterpoints, and gives us a sense that we are gliding just above the road surface, rather than being on it.

Audiovisual contrasts In Lost Highway Lynch uses strong and dynamic audiovisual contrasts: he uses a straight cut from a loud scene to one which is suddenly relatively quiet. He instantly cuts from a scene which features loud music, to a scene which has only ambient sound and dialogue, without 18

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any music in it at all. This high level of audiovisual contrast contains three kinds of immediate change: from music to sound effect, loud to soft, and from a dynamic scene to a static scene. This technique is equally effective in reverse, for example from sound effect to music, soft to loud, from a static scene to one that is dynamic. An example of this total audiovisual contrast appears in the first transition in the film: from the credits to the first scene. Lynch uses a fade, not a straight cut, in this instance. For another type of extreme contrast, Lynch uses fades into black, where we notice the blackness of the screen. Normally this wouldn’t happen, as the screen wouldn’t be black for such a noticeable length of time. This technique underlines the unsettling feeling that there are strange things going on beneath the everyday surface normality – and this sensation is heightened by the sound which comes into the foreground when the screen is black. Also, Lynch doesn’t use a standard length of fade: its length varies, like a shot length varies. For Lynch, cinema as an expressive medium involves a complete unity of music, sound and the visual track. He does not imagine or think in terms of the visual, then music. He thinks of both simultaneously. In Lynch’s films it is not possible to think in terms of just moving images.

Setting and dialogue The interior and exterior of Fred and Ren´ee’s house are straight from the pages of a glossy style magazine. Like houses featured in fashionable magazines it doesn’t look lived in: the nameless piles and everyday clutter which normally surround us at home are not there. The couple have the looks and perfect style straight from a commercial for a ‘lifestyle’ product. We easily accept this shiny environment, as it’s something to which we’ve been conditioned to aspire. The first indication that something is strange in this stylish advertisement normality is the dialogue between the couple: they speak to each other softly, with long pauses. They are communicating slowly as if each is in a trance. This Beckett or Pinter-like use of the pause creates in this context a sense that we are watching a dream, or even that each of the characters is dreaming about the other. 19

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Maurice Maeterlinck, the Belgian Symbolist playwright and poet most active in the late nineteenth century and the early years of the last century, used a similar pause technique to create a dreamlike or trance effect in his plays. The Symbolists were concerned with the musicality of speech, and it’s interesting that Lynch is equally concerned with precisely how his characters speak. He knows how to direct his actors to get them to say their lines at a pace that is slightly slower than is normal in cinema. His use of this technique is not exaggerated – he just slightly extends the duration of the natural pauses in everyday conversation, to give it an edge of oddness. He does this to the extent that we can’t quite understand exactly what is odd when we are watching what is happening. The pace of dialogue delivery is interwoven here with the pace of the actors’ movements. Lynch bases his approach to directing actors on what he calls ‘interior thinking’. He explains to the actors why he feels their pace should be a little less fast, where their performance is going to go, and how it should feel. He wants his actors to work from the inside, to ‘start in the interior’. In this way both the movements and the delivery of his actors will correspond to their inner impulses, and by using this method they will perform their role correctly.5

Pedals/drones/glissandi Just after Fred and Ren´ee have watched the first videotape of their house, we see Fred’s face in close-up, cross-cut with views of a nightclub at which he’s playing the tenor saxophone. His eyes follow the action and so we assume that what is happening at the club is from his point of view. The idea of the double is present, as Fred is seeing himself play the saxophone. This waking dream appears to be born of his suspicion about Ren´ee’s whereabouts when earlier he rang from the nightclub during a break, and she did not appear to be at home. Now Fred imagines a young man (Andy) glancing in his direction as Andy accompanies Ren´ee out of the club. We have already heard the very loud screaming and reeling glissandi6 of Fred’s saxophone playing, heightened by strobe lighting, but now we hear only the quiet sound of a soft low whooshing pedal or drone. This quiet sound may not even be noticed, as we are overwhelmingly aware of the absence of 20

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the music in what would normally be a very loud environment. This extreme contrast emphasises our impression of Fred’s anxiety. I call this soft sound a ‘pedal’ or a ‘drone’ as it is continuous, like a note played on the pedals of a church organ. You can hear this kind of continuous sound used again and again in TV horror films and ‘shockumentaries’, to create a disturbing mood, as a warning to us that something unpleasant is about to happen. And we have already heard (though perhaps not consciously) soft disturbing drones during the pauses in the conversation between Fred and Ren´ee, mentioned earlier. Why does the pedal note or drone have this effect on us? Is it because quiet, low, roaring sounds have warned us, from as far back as the times of our far distant ancestors, that something big and dangerous is about to strike? Chris Rodley, in his interview of David Lynch, notices that ‘Fred and Ren´ee’s house is full of deep rumbles, like an imminent Los Angeles earthquake’.7 This effect is like suspense in the form of sound, as you don’t know when the pedal or drone is going to end, and when it does end, what is going to happen: it functions like a form of ancestral sonic threat. This sense of threat is increased as usually we cannot see the source of the sound, so its origin remains an unsettling mystery – and when its source is eventually revealed, it often comes as a shock. David Lynch uses the drone or pedal technique throughout Lost Highway, and the first drone is heard, very softly, as soon as the opening credits have finished. These drones are combinations of various notes and noise-like sounds, which may also contain glissandi, which disrupt our sense of pitch, causing a further feeling of unease. These glissandi relate to the wild screaming tenor saxophone solo we heard Fred play at the start of the film. Some of the drones also feature fragments of variously distorted voices singing. Lynch uses a wide range of different types of drone, for example when we watch the first video the couple has mysteriously received. Two types of drone accompany the panning motion of the shot followed by a zoom, seen on the television screen. One drone is made up of various pitches and contains quite a high level of noise. The other is the white noise (an equal combination of all the audible range of frequencies) that appeared on pre-digital televisions when the image was lost, which is what happens here.

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Lynch also varies the volume of the drones. At times they are so soft as to have almost a subliminal effect on us, as in Fred’s waking dream described above. He also rapidly increases the volume of a drone and cuts it off abruptly, as in a straight cut in visual terms, to produce an overtly menacing and aggressive effect. This sound cut is sometimes combined either with a straight cut or some sudden visual change within a shot, for a maximum, visceral impact. Lynch explains the importance of the low-frequency part of these drones, which require low-frequency speakers: ‘There’s one channel of the six tracks that’s going to the subwoofer. There’s so much power there, and it gets all that low stuff. There’s an uneasiness there.’ However he does point out that it’s a technique which should not be overused.8

Doubles and sound In the first scene in the film, there is no establishing shot: we see a closeup of Fred’s face in semi-darkness, an uncertain space which brings to mind the first appearance of Henry Spencer’s face floating upwards horizontally in a dreamlike space in Eraserhead, Lynch’s first featurelength film. There’s the shock of an unexpected ring of the intercom. Then the added shock of an unknown, unseen voice announcing, ‘Dick Laurent is dead.’ Fred moves through the odd spaces of his house; the highpitched wails of a police siren are heard, softly, in the distance. He approaches a narrow window, then a much wider window, to see if anyone is outside. Nobody is there. Lynch explains to Rodley that this strange experience had actually happened to him at his own house.9 The double is related to the idea of the ghost: someone who is there and not there at the same time – here this is expressed in terms of sound. And the idea of the double is also present in another way, as the voice is speaking about someone who is dead, who has a presence, but is no longer actually there. When Fred meets the Mystery Man at a party, the sounds of what is happening around them are muted during their strange conversation. This type of concentration, when we can more or less block out extraneous music and noise when talking to someone who interests us, is what Fred experiences here, except that what is going on is not only 22

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Film noir On the first page of the script of Lost Highway Lynch describes the film as being ‘a twenty-first-century noir horror film’. When asked about this description by Chris Rodley, Lynch points out that this is ‘baloney’ – that it’s not a good idea to categorise films in such a glib manner. He doesn’t like films which can be fitted easily into a specific genre; he prefers films which combine various genres. He acknowledges that Lost Highway has elements of the horror and thriller genres, but if he has to opt for any genre, he would say that it is a mystery film.10 The first half of Lost Highway plays primarily on the fear we experience when our private space is being invaded. Our homes are not just physical spaces that are an intimate part of ourselves, but also extensions of who we are. So the couple’s house is an extension of their own selves. Its mysterious, shadowy and ambiguous spaces are as disturbing and mysterious as they are, and also as they are to each other – where is Ren´ee when Fred rings her up in his break? Though they appear normal, in a glossy idealised contemporary normality, they are actually as weird as the Mystery Man, who in addition looks strange, like an ageing androgynous vampire, a descendant of Murnau’s Nosferatu. Though disturbing, the initial videotape is dismissed by Ren´ee as being from a real estate agent, and it is only with the arrival of two more videos that the situation goes out of control. An archetypically noir space, the prison functions as the transition to the second part of the film. The mysterious space of the cell is where the transformation from Fred Madison to Pete Dayton is hatched. This is also a social transformation: from the tasteful, glossy, though shadowy

DOUBLE ECHOES: MUSIC AND SOUND IN DAVID LYNCH’S LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

interesting, but also deeply disturbing. Soft, almost subliminal drones underline the unsettling nature of this scene. Lynch also cuts off the ambient sound to make the uncanny ability of the Mystery Man to be in two places at once unambiguously and terrifyingly clear. And he shows us his face so it is evident that his mouth is tight shut; there’s no movement at all which could indicate ventriloquism. When the Mystery Man laughs, it sounds at first like a knowing reference to the echoing laughter of an evil character in the horror film tradition. However, here the echoed laugh is to emphasise that he can be in two places at once.

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spaces of Fred and Ren´ee’s house, to the tawdry untidy space of Pete’s work-place, the garage, and his parents’ garden with the stereotypically suburban white picket fence. The threatening presence of gangster Mr Eddy is initially a counterpart to the more ethereal, but equally threatening nature of the Mystery Man. The source of the fear changes, from the invasion of the private space of a house by someone unknown, to the fear of a person, like Mr Eddy, who can be unpredictably and extremely violent. Both private spaces (the house and the self) are invaded by the ringing telephone, which at any time in this film has the ominous sound of a call which awakes us at three in the morning.

Stanley Kubrick, real ghosts Lynch tells an anecdote about the time when he was just about to start shooting The Elephant Man in England. Some visiting American film executives told him that Stanley Kubrick had invited them to his home to watch a favourite film of his – Eraserhead. For Lynch this was ‘a hair of euphoria’ as he greatly admires Kubrick’s work: ‘almost every one of his films is in my top ten.’11 The ambiguous and empty spaces of the house in Lost Highway (and the Lost Highway Hotel) function, though on a much smaller scale, like the mysterious empty spaces of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Both films play with light and shadow as much as is possible within the context of a film in colour. Beyond the ambiguous realm of shadows and invisibility there is the opposite: a nightmare clarity of vision where someone is clearly seen in a space where we wouldn’t expect to see them. Fred, who appears to be recovering after the strain of the first love scene, looks over towards Ren´ee. Her face has gone, briefly replaced by strange lined masculine features with make-up, grotesquely framed by Ren´ee’s long hair. This is the first appearance of the Mystery Man in the film. Other examples of this type of hallucinatory nightmare vision appear in The Shining: the sudden appearance of Grady’s daughters in a long empty corridor, and the hundreds of ghosts in the Gold Room of the Overlook Hotel. In Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), his film of Henry James’ ghost story The Turn of the Screw, at times the ghosts appear in bright sunlight. The effectiveness of this approach is due to our association of the supernatural with the hidden, with vagueness and lack of clarity, 24

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Stanley Kubrick, contemporary music and the horror film Both Kubrick and Lynch follow the horror film tradition of using scores influenced by contemporary classical music. In the Hammer horror films (from the 1950s to the 1970s) the jagged effectiveness of Sch¨onberg’s twelve-tone compositional method became in due course a clich´e. It was probably for this reason that Kubrick used Penderecki’s music in his rejuvenation of the film noir and horror tradition in The Shining. A horror film has to create in its audience a fear of the unknown. The use of avant-garde music in such films is initially effective, as audiences for this genre won’t for the most part be familiar with this style. One of Lynch’s favourite composers is Penderecki, ‘who writes some really avant-garde things. The guy’s a heavyweight.’ Lynch encouraged Angelo Badalamenti to use techniques like those used by Penderecki: ‘to push the orchestra into some modern areas and still get a mood.’12 In the second part of Lost Highway, Lynch used the music of the German heavy metal rock band, Rammstein, for a similar reason – avant-garde music techniques, whether used by a rock band or by a composer in the European classical tradition, have the disturbing effect of the never-before-heard, ideal to heighten the sense of fear surrounding the unknown threats in horror and mystery films. Lynch uses more familiar rock music (for example ‘I’m Deranged’) in Lost Highway to obtain a completely different effect. This song by Bowie and Eno disappears from the speeding highway in the transition from the first part to the second part, where the central road markings change into double lines. However, there are broken lines on either side of these continuous lines, which is a contradiction, showing at once that you can and can’t cross the lines (and anyway, the car is travelling in the middle of the road as usual).

DOUBLE ECHOES: MUSIC AND SOUND IN DAVID LYNCH’S LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

something usually obscured by the dark. It’s doubly unexpected when ghosts appear as sharp and clearly defined, because this undermines our confidence in everyday appearances. Is what we’re seeing a ghost or not? Or is everyone we see actually a ghost? These are the ambiguities with which Lynch plays in Lost Highway.

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The ‘lost highway’ also appears without music during the second part: a familiar sound is not needed in these contexts. But at the end of the film, the Bowie/Eno song returns with the images of the highway. This provides a symmetry with the beginning: it is a final variant of the theme of the double, after Pete has turned back into Fred, Alice back into Ren´ee, and the intercom announcement of the death of Dick Laurent has also taken us back to the beginning of the film. In addition Lynch uses familiar rock music (‘This Magic Moment’ by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, performed by Lou Reed) for Pete’s first vision of Alice in the garage, in slow motion; this sequence is like a video clip. Lynch’s uses of more commercial music provide the necessary breaks in the tension he builds up in the film. Repeated images echo across the film; sometimes mysterious, they can have the force of a premonition, a pre-echo in time. An example is the exploding cabin, seen in reverse. The electro-acoustic sounds which accompany the reversed explosions are also reversed. This technique of reversing sound became popular with the development of tape-recording technology in the 1950s, which helped to create electro-acoustic music. This is music that makes use of instrumental and natural sounds which are processed in various ways. The reversal concept also has associations with the tradition of magic. However, in the mix for the sounds for the reverse exploding cabin there are musical fragments which are not reversed. This combination of time moving forwards and backwards simultaneously is part of the theme of the double in the film. This ubiquity of time is reflected in the nightmare visions of Ren´ee’s dismembered corpse, experienced by both Fred and Pete in their varied confused states. Then there is the Mystery Man’s ‘We’ve met before’ routine applied to both Fred and Pete, the appearance of Andy in both parts of the film, the announcement of Dick Laurent’s death at the beginning of the film, though we see him very much alive (as Mr Eddy) in the second part – but then he is shot dead and a variant of the announcement of his death occurs at the end of the film. Laurent is an echo of the Fred/Pete example of the double: to Pete in the garage he is known as Mr Eddy, and as Dick Laurent to the police (and to Fred). The temporal aspect of the double is frozen in the black and white photograph Pete finds in Andy’s house. Here he sees in one place two couples: Mr Eddy with Ren´ee, and Andy with Alice. When Pete asks

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Eros and pornography Throughout the film Lynch associates lovemaking with the supernatural, danger and death. This association is underlined by the use of unsettling drones during the amorous activities, especially during the first part of the film. There is a long tradition of the intermixing of death and sensuality. Italian poets of the Renaissance associated the erotic climax with dying, and in French the orgasm is sometimes called ‘la petite mort.’ In the lovemaking scenes, Lynch exaggerates the sound of breathing, uses unsettling drones and shots with unusual angles, like the low-angle shot preceding the Mystery Man’s sudden appearance, when his face replaces Ren´ee’s face after the first lovemaking scene. This association of sexual ecstasy with horror is often found in folk tales. An example I came across in Haiti tells of a man who goes to bed with a mysterious and beautiful young woman. After intercourse the man is horrified to find that he is lying on a skeleton. A similar transformation occurs in The Shining when Jack Torrance is making love to a beautiful woman in a bath, only to find that he is with a decaying corpse. In the first half of the film Lynch is working within this tradition, which is also the tradition of vampire tales: the Mystery Man looks like a modern day vampire. The final lovemaking scene between Pete and Alice is lit in a strange way (by car headlamps), making it analogous in our minds with the strange blue-grey light in the pornographic video, projected on the giant screen. Lynch is playing with the voyeurism of the audience – there’s a tension between the love scene, with the exaggerated sounds of heavy breathing, and the pornographic films produced by the sadistic Mr Eddy.

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Alice which of the two women she is, without hesitation she points to herself in the photograph. Pete’s view of the photograph is analogous to when we recognise Jack Torrance in the 1920s black and white group photograph of guests at the Overlook Hotel at the end of Kubrick’s The Shining, a film which plays with ubiquity in time and place. Later, Alice has disappeared from the same photograph in Andy’s house: now Ren´ee is seen just with Mr Eddy and Andy.

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Unity in the detail, and in the total conception Lynch generalises the form of his filmmaking process through the analogy of a pyramid – an image of acceleration of perception and feeling, a gradual concentration by bringing elements into focus. The tip of the pyramid is reached and the film ‘takes off’ as a completed work: for Lynch, ‘film is flying!’ At the editing stage Lynch senses that his film can work at the pace he has in mind, but, as it’s all in fragments at that point, it’s only when he watches the whole thing that he realises that he needs to do much more in the way of cutting. And it’s in the final third of the film that he tends to make most of his cuts.13 Lynch is careful that every detail in sound, music and image fits with his conception of his film. He lavishes as much attention on sound and music as on the visual track. He mentions the sounds which can be heard in a room: ‘you find the sound that creeps into that silence.’ This sound is what determines a mood, a feeling. Then Lynch explains that he gets rid of everything that is not relevant, and he accentuates all aspects which come together as a whole to bring his audience to an extreme emotion: crying, or laughing hysterically, or afraid. Someone moves at a certain pace, an idea is there, a sound, a word, and then there’s ‘a look there when the music hits’. How does all this work? Lynch answers his own question, saying, ‘It’s unbelievable, the power of cinema.’14 With reference to his use of music and sound he concludes that a film is comparable to a symphony. If the film is going to be effective in terms of stimulating emotion in the audience, then everything in it should be part of a cumulative structure: for example, climactic chords cannot just be heard without the preparation from all directions in the work, which leads specifically to them. For Lynch, the continuum between the visual and sound also applies to his approach to the continuum between sound and music: he states enthusiastically that ‘the borderline between sound effects and music is the most beautiful area’.15 On the borderline is where Lost Highway happens. Lynch explores in this film what is mysterious and difficult to define, to categorise. Paradoxically he achieves the uncertain spaces in Lost Highway by using very detailed and precise means.

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3 Audiovisual Irony, Terror, Ecstasy Irony: David Lean, This Happy Breed (1944), tragic news In 1928, Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov signed what they called a Statement on Sound. The sound film was about to irreversibly change the nature of cinema. These Russian filmmakers used their Statement to confront what they felt would be the dangers this new technology could bring. One of the dangers they foresaw was that cinema would just become filmed theatre, and so would lose its cinematic quality. So one of the recommendations they made was that ‘the first experiments in sound must aim at a sharp discord with the visual images’.1 David Lean’s epic film This Happy Breed (1944) was based on a play by Noel Coward, and could easily have become an example of the type of filmed theatre the signatories to the Statement on Sound were worried that sound cinema would become. However, there is a particularly striking scene in this film, where sound is used ‘at a sharp discord with the visual images’. This Happy Breed shows what happens to an English lower-middle class family living in a London suburb, between World War I and World War II, a time of great social change. The father, Frank, is a veteran of World War I. His son Reg gets married, and one of his two daughters, Queenie, leaves the family to have a relationship with a married man. Frank’s wife, Ethel, disowns her, to his dismay. A letter from Queenie arrives. Sylvia, Frank’s widowed sister, describes the envelope to Ethel’s elderly mother, who is particularly 29

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disgusted by the fact that there’s a French stamp on the letter. Ethel serves afternoon tea, and turns on the radio, which was new technology at that time, and is not liked by Ethel’s mother at all. Ethel takes a cup of tea to her husband in the garden, where he is watering the plants. Sylvia and Ethel’s mother are now the only ones in the dining room. Sylvia notes that the radio was a gift from Reg, Ethel’s son, and that his mother has been listening to it all day. There’s an unexpected ring at the front door, and Queenie’s sister, Vi, enters the dining room with particularly shocking news: Reg and his wife, who were on a day out, have both been killed when their car was hit by a lorry. Vi encourages Sylvia to take the elderly lady out of the room, as both are visibly distraught, and they both leave. Then Vi goes into the garden to break the terrible news to her mother and father. The dining room is now empty. The music on the radio is a jaunty 1930s dance band piece. The camera moves very slowly in a dolly shot across the room to face where we assume Frank and Ethel will enter, from the garden. In the empty room, the lively dance music continues for what seems a long time, and we also hear the sounds of children playing nearby. At last we see Ethel appear, followed by Frank, walking slowly from the garden into the dining room, faces frozen in shock, their entire beings bearing the overwhelming weight of their personal tragedy. Accompanying their silence, the happy dance tune continues to be heard on the radio, with the intermittent sounds of children playing in the background. In their grief Frank and Ethel remain silent, and don’t appear to hear anything. But we have been experiencing ‘this sharp discord with the visual images’ from when the room was empty, and we were waiting for the couple to come in from the garden, and we heard the relentless jollity of the dance from the radio (the gift from Ethel’s son) and the everyday sounds of children playing. This scene is an example of what the French novelist Gustave Flaubert called le grotesque triste, a most bitter irony, in this instance expressed audiovisually in what seems to be a simple and most direct way. The effect is made more powerful, as we are each left to imagine Ethel’s and Frank’s first reaction to the news of their son’s death, in their garden, out of our sight. The everyday music and sounds provide a sharp dissonance with what we see: daily life continues as normal, beyond individual grief. And both the tragic and ironic aspects of what has happened are the

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Terror: Alfred Hitchcock, The Birds (1963), the escape from school On the theatrical release poster for The Birds there are two publicity quotes from Hitchcock: ‘It could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made . . . and remember, the next scream you hear may be your own!’ Years ago, when I taught film for a while in a girls’ Catholic school, I only showed The Birds once, to a class of sixteen-year-olds. The screams of the students during the film were so loud, I was concerned that my colleagues would come running to rescue them. I never showed this film again at that school. If we examine Hitchcock’s audiovisual composition of the scene in which pupils escape from their junior school, we can begin to understand why The Birds can induce such strong reactions in an audience. By this point in the film there has already been an attack by birds on a children’s party outdoors, and an avian invasion of a house. Earlier, a seagull attacked the heroine Melanie Daniels, and a farmer has been killed by birds – so Hitchcock has prepared his audience for more attacks. Melanie drives to the small local junior school where her friend, the teacher, is conducting her class as they sing a song. Melanie goes to a bench outside to wait until they have finished their lesson. As she waits, she smokes a cigarette. We hear the children continue to sing the repetitive folk song, the kind which adds something to the end of each verse, so that the last line becomes a list which gets longer and longer. This musical repetition and accumulation are visually paralleled by a gradual gathering of crows behind Melanie. She does not see them as they begin to take over the children’s climbing frame behind her. At last, she looks up and notices a crow flying past. The camera follows her point of view as she sees the bird joining the others on the frame, which is now full of crows, with more birds massed on nearby roofs. The contrast between the shot of the single bird in flight and the hundreds of birds it joins provides a visual shock, augmented by the unsettling feeling provoked by any view of a mass of potentially

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result of new technology: the car became affordable at this time, so this kind of accident became more frequent, and the radio was also a new arrival.

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threatening creatures, producing a sense of the invasion of human space. Now terrified, Melanie returns as calmly as possible to the classroom to let her friend know what has happened outside. Under the pretence of a fire drill, the teacher instructs the children to leave in silence, until she tells them to run down the hill as fast as possible to safety. Hitchcock now cuts to a shot of the massed crows on the climbing frame. What follows is an audiovisual explosion: the birds are relatively quiet, then there’s the sudden accent of the sound of the unseen children running, then the sight and the sound of all the birds taking off to attack the children, and we see the birds attacking them as they run down the road. The controlled repetition in the music of the singing children has now exploded into a chaos of noise of screaming children and the loudly flapping wings and cries of the birds. The repetitions of the folk song, together with the accompanying accumulation of the crows, create a building-up of audiovisual tension, which is held by a brief moment of relative quiet, in the shot of the massed crows on the frame, before the sound of children’s feet running triggers the audiovisual explosion of sound and movement as all the birds take off at once. What follows is an audiovisual montage of fragments from this explosion, as we see the mass of screaming schoolchildren intercut with close-up shots of children’s faces being attacked by the birds, as they run down the hill. A girl falls over, we see a shot of her shattered glasses on the road. Her face is bleeding, she is led to safety by the two women. There are shots of the chaotic mass of birds and children, contrasted with shots of individual children being attacked in various ways amidst the rush down the steep hill. Where have I seen something like this before? Overlooking the mayhem of the attack by the birds there are shots taken from the top of the hill, looking down to the harbour and calm sea beyond. These are the shots which provided me with the clue. Similar shots, from the top of the steps down to Odessa’s harbour and the calm sea beyond, can be seen in Eisenstein’s ‘Odessa Steps’ sequence, a scene of Cossack soldiers shooting into a crowd down a huge flight of steps, from his film The Battleship Potemkin (1925). In the sequence of the massacre on the Odessa Steps there’s the chaotic flow of humanity downwards, the relentless attacks from

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above, the rhythmic oppositions of shots: mass versus detail. The rapid montage of shots which Eisenstein uses came to be known as ‘Russian cutting’. There are close-up shots of violence from different points down the steps: a young mother is shot in the stomach; a little boy who has been shot is lying down, his head is bleeding, he reaches out to be rescued by his mother; the smashed glasses of an older woman who has been shot in the eye. And at the beginning there’s the jarring movement of a young woman’s head, the first person to be shot, this sudden movement detonates the explosion of the subsequent massacre. As a civil engineering student, Eisenstein had learned about how explosions work, how detonators function, and he applied this knowledge to his montage methods, when he wished to produce an analogous effect in his films. There are more differences than similarities between the Odessa Steps sequence and the attack of the birds on the fleeing schoolchildren, but their basic explosive montage structure is the same. The resulting terror, as if one was in the middle of the unpredictable and extreme violence, is the same. Whether Hitchcock was or wasn’t aware of these similarities between his montage for this sequence in The Birds and the Odessa Steps sequence is not significant. What is significant is that it would be surprising if Hitchcock had not seen Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin.

Ecstasy: Werner Herzog, Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), first flight This is a film about the deaf blind. There’s a paradox here: Herzog uses the audiovisual medium of cinema to produce a documentary about people who will never be able to watch or listen to it. This is a film of great emotional significance for Herzog: ‘Land of Silence and Darkness is a film particularly close to my heart. If I had not made it there would be a great gap in my existence.’2 How does Herzog bring himself, and us, to begin to understand what it must be like to be both blind and deaf? Early in the film we see three women sitting, facing the camera. Two are deaf and blind, and the third uses the language of touch on their palms to communicate with them. The two deaf-blind women tell us 33

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of their recent visit to a zoo. Their visit had been specially planned for a concentration on touch. Then Herzog shows us the two women being guided as they touch the wings of a small plane, before they enter it to take their first flight. From using a tripod for the shot of the seated women, Herzog now uses the hand-held camera. Here we have a big leap: from the stasis when they were sitting in a row, to the ecstasy of movement in flight. This is an example of the leap to an opposite quality or state. Eisenstein explains that this is how the phenomenon of pathos or ecstasy manifests itself. He states that the very word ‘ecstasy’ is derived from a combination of ‘ex’ meaning ‘out of’, plus ‘stasy’, meaning stasis.3 There’s also a leap from experience to innocence, and innocence to experience. Their account of their visit to the zoo evokes strong childhood memories and childlike emotions, as does their touching of the plane’s wings. Touch is the sense which dominates: they feel the wings of the aircraft, they enter it, they sense that special moment at the instant they leave the ground and become airborne, then they soar into the sky. These are sensations they have never experienced before. There’s an ecstatic dimension here, as we can see from their reactions. It was a wonderful idea that Herzog had, to charter a small plane so that these two deaf-blind women could have this first experience of flight, and at the same time capture for us something of what it means to be in their condition. But what has all this to do with the ‘Air’ from J.S. Bach’s orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major? As the plane leaves the ground, Herzog fades out the noise of its engines, so that the music by Bach comes through alone, beyond the earth-bound world, ecstatic.

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4 Where’s the Film Composer? Music, Image and Sound in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) I was just old enough to be able to appreciate the sort of impact that 2001: A Space Odyssey had on audiences of the time. There was a ‘have you seen 2001?’ buzz going around my school, and lots of discussions after having seen it: about what the film meant, Kubrick’s use of music, space exploration and deep space, time travel, extraterrestrial life forms, and of course the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Looking back to the period in which the film was made and screened, Kubrick’s film really caught the mood of the mid to late 1960s, the period from when he first met Arthur C. Clarke in 1964, ‘to develop ideas for a film about extraterrestrials’ to the film’s release in 1968.1 This was a period of immense technological confidence and optimism, when thinking about the future was (unlike now) usually a pleasurable activity. It was a time of release from the ‘rigid surface cultural blocks’ Kubrick mentioned in a rare interview: ‘I think that 2001, like music, succeeds in short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience and is able to cut directly through to areas of emotional comprehension.’2 These were the ‘blocks’ which at the time I associated with the desperately boring, worthy and stultifying atmosphere of Britain in the 1950s and the early 1960s. The impact of 2001 on me was direct and vivid. Visually I found it overwhelming, and musically it was a revelation. I’d heard compositions by composers like Xenakis and Penderecki on late-night 35

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broadcasts on Radio France’s classical music station France Musique, and I was fascinated by Ligeti’s music in the film. The piece which had the most impact on me was his Requiem, particularly the section accompanying the astronauts’ visit to the monolith on the moon. I’d never heard anything like this music before – it was a completely new sound, a new experience. I had no idea at the time how it had been composed and notated: there was a sense that now, musically as well, anything was possible. 2001 is unusual in that there are just over 40 minutes of dialogue in a work which has a total duration of 143 minutes. So it’s an ideal film for a study of Kubrick’s use of the interaction of music, image and sound.

The overture Kubrick gets the mood he wants even before the film starts by having an excerpt from Ligeti’s orchestral piece Atmospheres, heard by the audience as they wait in the auditorium for the film to begin. This use of music is similar to the function of an overture for an opera. Normally a film’s overture would be in a musical style familiar to the audience. Ligeti’s music would have been at the time a really strange experience for most people – they simply hadn’t heard this type of music before. So it had a mysterious unsettling quality combined with a sense of the ultra-modern, ideal to establish the mood for a film set 33 years into the future.

The epic form Also Sprach Zarathustra, a tone poem by Richard Strauss (one of the composer’s own favourite works), was also not a known work at the time – it wasn’t in the standard orchestral repertoire. It has an arresting archetypal character. Beginning with a mysterious low pedal (for organ, double basses, contrabassoon and tuned bass drum) it automatically suggests a vast scale, appropriate to the alignment of the celestial bodies we see in combination with this music. The fanfare-like nature of the brass score continues the archetypal character of the music: these tonic/dominant/tonic intervals are the first and most basic ones in the harmonic series. The concluding chords have a gigantically triumphal 36

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and ecstatic quality (Strauss called the beginning of his piece ‘Sunrise’) ideally suited to the cosmic images we see. This short fragment is also ideal in terms of cinematic time: very quickly we sense that a cosmic drama is about to unfold. The word ‘cosmic’ was often used at this time, and it’s worth mentioning that Kubrick had been reading Joseph Campbell’s influential book The Hero with a Thousand Faces in preparation for this film. Campbell’s research in myth is all about the use and nature of archetypes. 2001 is a film in the epic mode, something which would account for some of the derision it provoked amongst some critics at the time. Renata Adler of the New York Times described it as being ‘somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring’ and Pauline Kael was even more disparaging.3 The epic form needs a total commitment from its audience. By its very nature it is large scale, all-encompassing, and can as a result be occasionally unwieldy in terms of form. The epic has never worked in a rational way. It is not a form which is normally appreciated in a ‘time is money’ environment like the 1950s, or the present, and the past three decades. Because the epic works at a level which is beyond the rational, it doesn’t sit easily in a very self-conscious time, like today, when it is widely derided as a ‘grand narrative’. However, at this point in the 1960s there was a significant interest in the irrational, in myth, ritual, and the ‘cosmic’ epic form. In terms of film, this was evident in works like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967) and his Medea (1969), and Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (1969). In order to create a sense of the epic, you need, right from the beginning of a work, to present your material in large slabs, combined with fine detail. This is exactly what Kubrick does in 2001: he presents large chunks of audiovisual material, which always possess an element of fine detail. It’s only by combining the very small with the huge that the necessary sense of scale is present. The lack of detail in the alignment of the celestial bodies is compensated by the fine detail in Richard Strauss’s accompanying music. In terms of an audiovisual balance between image and music, I think that here the music has a slight edge over the image. Then, audiovisually, the opposite happens with the vast and detailed panoramas from South West Africa we see next: each one is present on the screen long enough for us to appreciate its detail, and therefore

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to appreciate its scale. Technically Kubrick achieved this detail by front-projecting large transparencies.4 The sound accompanying them is relatively generalised: mostly the cries of birds, the stridulation of cicadas and the sound of the desert wind. These sounds provide a sense of continuity across the usually straight cuts which are used to move from one panoramic image to another. By using this audiovisual articulation at the beginning of the film, Kubrick provides the clearly outlined slabs of material characteristic of the start of an epic. At this point, to maintain the epic mode, it is crucial for Kubrick to avoid the silliness of the kind of early human represented in films like Planet of the Apes (which was also released in April 1968). He does this by augmenting some of the ape-like suits with male appendages, interposing a shot featuring baby chimps and using performers who can move well: dancers and mime actors.5 The rasping grunts which they emit (and we’re easily fooled into believing that the sounds are produced by these hominids) are evidently sounds made by some sort of animal. These grunts are realistically alike (actors would probably produce an artificially wide variety of grunts) and they contribute overwhelmingly to our sense that we are really watching creatures midway between apes and humans. In addition, the similarity of these sounds produces a slab of rough-hewn musicality, a hominid chorus. The approach of night heralds the appearance of the mysterious black monolith. In a mythical and archetypal manner, the first rays of the rising sun strike the monolith and cause it to radiate music. This is reminiscent of the legend of the Statue of Memnon, a colossal statue of Amenhotep III at Thebes in ancient Egypt, which when struck by the rays of the rising sun was thought by the ancient Greeks to be the voice of Memnon, the Ethiopian king. The feeling of awe created at this point in the film was due not only to Kubrick’s ingenious composition of sounds, music and spectacular images, which lead inevitably to the reappearance of Ligeti’s music, but to the impact of this totally unfamiliar music on the audiences of the time.

A revolution in music To get a sense of this impact I need to describe the sorts of changes which took place in Western classical music during the 1950s and early 38

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Classic architecture knew only the post as an upright. Call it a column. The classics knew only the beam as a horizontal. Call it a beam. The beam resting upon the upright, or column, was structure throughout, to them. Two things, you see, one thing set on top of another thing in various materials and put there in various ways. Ancient and nineteenthcentury building science too [ . . . ] consisted simply in reducing the various stresses of all materials and their uses to these two things: post and beam.6

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1960s. A way to understand what happened can be reached through reading an American architect’s description of classical architecture:

Frank Lloyd Wright’s description of the post-and-beam technique is analogous to what composers were doing in the Western classical tradition, the musical world with which the audience in 1968 was most familiar. This European tradition, which can be traced as far back as the sixteenth century, also comprises most of the forms of popular and commercial music. These forms of music were (and largely are) based on musical structures which depend on tonality, a harmonic and melodic technique which tends to encourage vertical arrangements of harmony supporting horizontal melody: like a ‘post-and-beam’ structure. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, composers like Gustav Mahler, C´esar Franck and Claude Debussy, followed by Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, began to experiment with techniques which weakened the ‘post-andbeam’ structures of tonality. However, the shadows of tonal structures remained in their music. We have to wait until the post World War II period before we see these shadows of tonal structures mostly disappear. This phenomenon came with the development of electronic, electroacoustic and computer music. For Frank Lloyd Wright, about 40 years earlier, it was the advent of steel: . . . both support and supported may now by means of inserted and welded steel strands [ . . . ] be plaited and united as one physical body: ceilings and walls made one with floors and reinforcing each other by making them continue into one another [ . . . ] where the beam leaves off and the post begins is no longer important nor need it be seen at

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all because it no longer actually is. Steel in tension enables the support to slide into the supported, or the supported to grow into the support somewhat as a tree-branch glides out of its tree trunk [ . . . ] In other words the upright and horizontal may now be made to work together as one. A new world of form opens up inevitably.7

This is what happened in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s electronic and electro-acoustic music, and in the similarly revolutionary music composed by Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutoslawski and Ge¨orgy Ligeti. The latter three composers were working under a Soviet-dominated totalitarian regime, which was aesthetically against the electronic experimentation of Stockhausen and other composers in Western Europe. So these composers in the Soviet bloc transferred the exciting electronically devised discoveries from Western Europe into a more traditional orchestral and choral context. If we take Frank Lloyd Wright’s tree and place it horizontally, as music works through time, we get an idea of the way in which this extract from Ligeti’s Requiem actually works: (Fig. 1) These lines represent melodic development. Where does the melody really begin? Where does it end? There’s not just one melody, but a whole range of them, growing organically, like branches from a tree trunk. This indeed was a ‘new world of form’ in music in 1968. Previously in the Western musical tradition, there was a symmetry in the use of keys. This approach to tonality involved clearly establishing a key, moving away from it to other related keys, then returning to the ‘home’ key at the end of the piece of music. Like ‘post-andbeam architecture’ this compositional method enclosed space, but now

Figure 1. ‘A new world of form opens up inevitably.’ 40

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Cinema, space, the monolith The articulation of space is as important in cinema as it is in music. In 2001 Kubrick is keen to create a ‘saturated’ space surrounding the audience. Not only does he create this type of space in his film, but he extends this concept to the music by Ligeti, the Atmospheres for orchestra, which the audience hears before the film begins, as well as during the intermission or interval. This is a technique which was frequently used in theatres in the 1960s. For example, The Living Theatre, the avant-garde American theatre group, encouraged the interaction of actors with the audience, breaking the convention of the invisible ‘fourth wall’ in the theatre, which traditionally separates the actors from the audience. This technique was an extension of the ‘total theatre’ ideas of Erwin Piscator – Judith Malina, one of the directors of The Living Theatre had studied with him in New York in the 1940s. The 1960s was also the period of the total audiovisual-theatrical event: the Happening, which often involved the active participation of audiences. Other examples of the saturation of the audience space were the light shows which accompanied high-volume dance music at ‘discos’, the predecessors of what came to be known as ‘raves’. So Kubrick saturates the audience space not only in the film, but outside it. But his sense of space in 2001 isn’t limited to this direct and literal approach. One of the key themes of his film is the nature of space itself, and the mysteries which surround it: ‘the most important parts of a film are the mysterious parts – beyond the reach of reason and language.’8 Though Kubrick here is talking in 1975 about his film Barry Lyndon, it’s likely that his interest in the mysterious, and its direct relationship to our subconscious, was really first developed by his work on 2001. The mysterious elements in 2001 are largely the reason for the film’s reputation for being ambiguous and, worse, incomprehensible. This notion of ambiguity is related to the idea of the ‘open’ form, a form which is disjunctive, discontinuous and open to more than one interpretation, like the epic. However, what is striking is that

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the new technique liberated the composer from these constraints, and enabled the production of structures which create spaces, like the organic spaces Wright developed in his revolutionary architecture.

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Kubrick’s ambiguities are present in a crystal-clear form, not in a visually confusing way: his dark and mysterious space is usually full of a paradoxical light and clarity. This sense of the paradoxical mysterious is embodied in the most mysterious object in the film: the monolith. It is black, like space without stars. It both absorbs light and appears to reflect it, and it radiates energy. We see it clearly because it has an unambiguous structure. Yet its blackness, or absence of definition, is the opposite of something clearly perceived. This is why the hominids as well as the sophisticated astronauts feel obliged to touch it. The audience can’t touch the monolith, but instead they have Ligeti’s music, which radiates out from the screen at them: its organic multiplicity filling a space at once melodic, rhythmic and harmonic, like nothing the audience has heard before. This is also evidently not a sound effect, but music, and the type of music which is far from the clearly defined straight lines of the monolith itself. So this sense of ‘newness’, together with the mysterious, goes well with the limitless space Kubrick succeeds in evoking in 2001. This paradoxical combination is also evident in the intense clarity of his depiction of the outside and inside spaces of the space station circling Earth, and the spaceship Discovery.

The Blue Danube So why does Kubrick choose The Blue Danube waltz by Johann Strauss to accompany the orbiting space station? This, after all, is archetypically ‘post-and-beam’ music: you know exactly where the music begins, you know where it ends; you know where the melody begins, you know where it ends. It is something limited, circular – we’re comfortable with it; humankind may be fascinated by the limitless, but most of us don’t appear to be comfortable with it. This waltz could create parasitic associations with ‘home’. When ‘some people told him this waltz would create parasitic associations with orchestras in grand hotels and Viennese operettas, Kubrick declared, “Most people under 35 can think of it in an objective way, as a beautiful composition [ . . . ] It’s hard to find anything much better than The Blue Danube for depicting grace and beauty in turning. It also gets about as far away as you can get from the clich´e of space music.”’9 Apparently the choice of the Strauss waltz came about by chance: 42

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According to Michel Chion, the music Kubrick had ‘originally tried out [ . . . ] and almost adopted, was the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’11) . This shows that Kubrick was the kind of artist who could accommodate the chance event, which at a subconscious level is linked directly to the creative process. Kubrick’s claim that young audiences could think of a piece of music ‘in an objective way, as a beautiful composition’ I find odd. Surely the sense of the beautiful is a combination of the subjective and the culturally acquired. It has been said that beauty is simply a recognition of the familiar. I believe that if Kubrick had been right about the under 35’s in his audience, then his combination of the waltz by Johann Strauss with the images of the vast wheel-like space station in orbit would have been far less effective. I was under 35 at the time, and his use of the waltz brought out for me all sorts of associations. Familiarity is still a vital part of the effectiveness of this famous waltz, which has never left the orchestral repertoire since its first performance in Vienna in 1867. This sense of the familiar is all the more powerful, given that the music we have already heard in the film has been largely unfamiliar and strange. This sensation of familiarity is also important for a number of reasons. The idea of ‘home’ mentioned above is a significant idea here. What is a space station if not a home? The scientists in 2001 have tried to make it as much as possible like home (though some of its spaces now look like airport departure lounges) by having a Bell videophone linkup with Earth. The communication between the father and daughter, and, later, the ‘birthday’ message Poole receives from his parents, are attempts to recreate domestic experiences in a vastly remote setting, remote in both space and time. I remember a sequence (which was subsequently cut by Kubrick) where the astronauts could be seen having the leisure time to listen to masterpieces of classical music, and to watch films of great performances from the past – an activity for which back on Earth they probably would not have had the time, but

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The projectionist had fallen asleep and had let the film run while his radio was on . . . Stanley really showed his open-mindedness and was able to seize the opportunities that presented themselves to him.10

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which connects them with pinnacles of Western culture, bringing a certain warmth and humanity to the cold and long emptiness of space travel. The idea of the summit of human achievement is also present in the fact of the space station itself. Kubrick uses every technical means at his disposal to create in us a sense of awe: the full use of the landscape format of the screen, the tiny details in the images of the space station – as we watch this, we are looking at the space station from another spacecraft, and from inside its docking bay. In the technologically optimistic 1960s, Kubrick wants us to see Space Station 5 as a reality in the not too distant future. The big ultra-clean spaces inside it are a real contrast with the clunky and claustrophobic space stations in the actual year 2001, where things are always going wrong and in which astronauts pee in their trousers. However, Kubrick is also showing us how, even in the most controlled and immaculate conditions, human error eventually manifests itself. So The Blue Danube waltz, the familiar classic of sophisticated Viennese culture, is an ideal accompaniment for the sophistication of the huge gyrating space station. It’s not by accident that Kubrick chose the conductor Herbert von Karajan’s version, with the Berlin Philharmonic, the orchestra with which Karajan was most closely associated. To conduct or play a Strauss waltz correctly demands a special skill, acquired by acculturation, normally through growing up in the culture which produced this type of dance. Years of practice are needed, and this learning process applies to dance forms worldwide. The way the music is related to the movement of the body in a particular culture determines how a trick of the rhythm transforms a mechanically moving body into an organically moving one. This rhythmic quality is based on an aesthetic decision: when to hold back the pace and when to dive into movement once again. It is this vital sense of timing that makes dance exciting, giving it what is variously called ‘grace’, ‘´elan’, or ‘swing’. This is the part which the composer cannot notate: it’s the organic part of what is, in the case of the waltz, a straightforward ‘post-and-beam’ type of structure. And Karajan, with his Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, came directly from the Germanic culture which gave birth to the waltz. The key dance movement feature of the waltz is rotation. The couples spin, they swing round in multiple rotations, going round the

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‘The Dawn of Man’ and the ‘Jupiter Mission’

WHERE’S THE FILM COMPOSER?

dance floor in a wider rotation: rotation within rotation, like the space station in its orbit around the Earth. So here is a perfect marriage of music and moving image, via a human dance movement which is never seen, but which seems to make a gigantic machine dance in space. And there is nothing abstract about it: the music is as referential as the images with which it interacts.

How do the electronic pulses and machine drones Kubrick uses in the ‘Jupiter Mission’ episode relate to the sound of the cicadas and other sounds of nature at the beginning of the film? On closer examination, this sonic comparison opens some interesting audiovisual links between these two key episodes in the film. Visually, in ‘The Dawn of Man’ episode, Kubrick immediately establishes vast horizon-dominated landscapes, in which sky and earth, up and down spaces are clearly delineated. In contrast, the spaces shown in the voyage to Jupiter are more ambiguous: down and up are not so clear when we first see Poole, the astronaut, jogging round inside the curve of the spaceship Discovery, filmed at an angle which places him at 90 degrees to the vertical. The next shot underlines the up/down ambiguity – Poole is now vertical as would be normal, but is he going down the slope of the wall or floor of the spaceship, or up the 360 degrees of the ‘running track’? Gravity is underlined in ‘The Dawn of Man’ when a leopard leaps down from a ledge onto an unsuspecting hominid. In Discovery gravity is artificially localised, and the movements of the astronauts become insect-like, moving in every position, including upside-down and at any angle to the vertical, and often rotating. We shall see how the threat to humankind on this spaceship is as much inside as it is outside. Life four million years ago is shown to be basic and rough, the hominids scratching for survival around a muddy water hole, whereas life on Discovery is surrounded by immaculately clean and utilitarian white surfaces, mechanical symmetries: only the space outside is untidy, like the vast horizoned landscapes in ‘The Dawn of Man’. The long planes of natural sounds, the stridulation of the cicadas, the intermittent bird cries have their futuristic counterparts in the continuous sounds of various engines, muted, as heard in jet travel. These continuities of 45

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sound bring together, across the straight cuts, the wide-angle shots of the beginning of the film, and the multi-angle shots inside and outside Discovery. The loud, raucous animalistic grunts of the hominids have become the even tones of the unemotional speech of the astronauts Poole and Bowman. As we have witnessed the ape-like hominids becoming incrementally more like humans, so we now see humans beginning to resemble machines (especially in their spacesuits), at the same time as a machine (HAL, the on-board computer) begins to behave more like a human than the machine-like astronauts. Audiovisually, the human aspect is combined directly with the mechanical aspect when we hear the breathing of Bowman and Poole on their space walks, combined with the cicada-like hissing of their supply of air. In choreographic terms the hominids tend to repetitively jump up and down, and scratch the ground. They mostly move and take shelter in groups, in a chorus of grunts. In four million years the protective primeval cave has become a spaceship, and due to the low gravity the astronauts are strapped into seats, and are shown to be as much on their own as together. The movements of the hominids are midway between animal and human, especially in the discovery of a bone as a destructive tool. The astronauts’ movements are affected by their spacesuits, which resemble insect exo-skeletons. Their helmets, with the two eye-like spots on the top, underline this resemblance, as Bowman and Poole emerge from their pod and we cannot see their faces, just what looks like the head of an insect with unblinking eyes. In the world of the hominids, we see killing take place outside, in front of everyone, but HAL kills humans at a distance and out of sight in space. We don’t see Poole colliding with the pod which HAL is using as a weapon, like the hominid a bone. He also kills the three hibernating astronauts at a distance, when nobody is there to notice what is happening.

The three space walks The ‘Jupiter Mission’ section is divided into three space walks: first with Bowman, then Poole, then Bowman again. In terms of sound, the first two walks feature the close-up sound of the binary rhythm of their breathing, against the continuous hiss of their air supply, a combination of the subjectively human versus the objectively mechanical. With 46

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Poole’s death appears total silence, the silence of outer space. We see him struggling vainly to regain his air supply, in complete silence. Each time we see him floating freely in space, the rotation of his nolonger writhing body is more and more slow. The binary sound of his breathing has changed into rotation in silence. He is dead, yet he continues to move – the pace of the choreography of his spinning corpse is each time different, and consequently each total silence is rhythmically different. When Bowman, on the third and final spacewalk, forgets to don his helmet, there’s no shot of an insect-like head emerging from the pod. And in his pod he appears more human (his head and hands are visible), yet we lose the sound of his breathing. Instead we hear the sound of his pod’s engine, and then the binary electronic pulse as he monitors the coordinates on his screen in order to capture Poole’s body using the pod’s mechanical arms and claws. Poole’s face has remained hidden – his body encased machine-like in his space suit, mostly seen at a distance. When Bowman realises that HAL won’t allow him to return to Discovery, he has to release Poole’s body into space and prepare for a dangerous re-entry via an emergency airlock in the spaceship. This manoeuvre is accompanied by the sound of a rough-edged low pulse, against which are counterpointed repeated high-pitched rapidly rising glissandi, tension-inducing warning signals as Bowman prepares to reenter the spaceship. There is an explosion, a puff of smoke, and we see Bowman being violently thrown from one part of the airlock to the other. All this happens in total silence, again a different silence, due to our conditioned response to the ‘noise’ evoked by the explosion and the ensuing mechanical violence. Bowman is in the vacuum of space without a helmet, but as the outer hatch closes, air is released into the chamber, and we hear the rush as it suddenly enters and violently destroys the silence. Meanwhile, while Bowman has been out, HAL has murdered the three astronauts in hibernation in their futuristic sarcophagi. This act is shown even more indirectly than the killing of Poole, through a shot of HAL’s ‘eye’, then from HAL’s point of view, and an audiovisual display on a screen and an oscilloscope. We barely see the faces of the immobile astronauts in suspended animation. The muted drone of the engine and machines on Discovery underlines a calm overview

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of their life functions, shown by the regular progression of variously shaped waves on an oscilloscope, each with their own pulse in a visual polyrhythmic counterpoint with each other. Then this quiet scene is suddenly interrupted by the entire wide screen instantly becoming bright red, with a loud and high binary pulse, accompanying the words COMPUTER MALFUNCTION, in white letters, pulsating like a heartbeat. The sound of this binary pulse continues over images of the immobile and unconscious astronauts, secured in their immaculate white boxes. And this pulse continues over a view of the various rhythms of the waves on the oscilloscope, as they each change into flat lines at different times, like a visual musical canon. Then another fullscreen warning appears, this time in bright orange, with the words LIFE FUNCTIONS CRITICAL appearing in the same heartbeat rhythm as before, but in an audiovisual counterpoint with a faster, higherpitched and therefore more urgent sound pulse. On the oscilloscope the various newly flat lines move at different speeds, producing an audiovisual rhythmic counterpoint to each other, and to the fast pulse, which results in audiovisual syncopation. This is followed by a silent full screen, again bright red, but now the heartbeat pulse of the words LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED is only visual, no audible pulse is heard any more. There’s an ironic element here, as life has gone. These three astronauts are as truly dead as Poole, who is spinning off into space, but the silent machine continues its functions: like HAL, it is still ‘live’. At this point the machines, with their artificial heartbeats and pulses, have taken over the spaceship. Its formerly hibernating astronauts, who were completely dominated by mechanical controls, die, and lose their humanity completely. Next comes HAL’s own death. Paradoxically it is more human, and is shown through a regression to the computer’s childhood and birth, expressed audiovisually, as Bowman gradually disconnects the machine’s components. We hear HAL’s voice returning to past memories, and finally singing a popular song which slows into incoherence and oblivion. Just as the ‘Jupiter Mission’ section is audiovisually comparable to ‘The Dawn of Man’ section, so Kubrick encourages us to compare with each other the three space walks we have just analysed in audiovisual terms. In 2001 Kubrick places his cameras so that we experience his film from an omniscient perspective, which is nevertheless intimate:

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WHERE’S THE FILM COMPOSER?

at any point we feel we are present in the action. During the ‘Jupiter Mission’ section we watch and hear what happens from every angle, both inside and outside the various spacecraft. Kubrick shows us how human and machine inter-penetrate in movements, environment, sound, points of view and light. His audiovisual choreography brings together mechanical and human movements, sounds, and the total silence of space. The more I think about Kubrick’s use of music, sound and silence in this film, the more I feel that his thinking and practice resemble that of a composer. He also composes his film in the way he encourages the audience to compare one section of the film with another, like movements in a symphony, and parts of a section with each other, as in a set of musical variations.

The ‘temp’ track At a meeting with the composer Alex North in London in 1967, Kubrick told him of his intention to retain for his film some of the music he had been using as a ‘temp’ track, including Mendelssohn’s Scherzo from his incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antartica for the Star Gate sequence. The temp track technique involves editing a film to a recording of pre-existing music, so as to find an effective audiovisual rhythm prior to the composition of the score which is intended for the film. What can happen is that the director becomes very attached to the temp track’s audiovisual result, and this can lead to the film’s composer being asked by the director to imitate the style of the music on the temp track.12 Alex North told Kubrick that he was concerned that unless his score was used, the film’s music would just be an assemblage of disparate fragments in unrelated musical styles.13

Diversity of styles But what intrigues me is exactly this problem: how Kubrick manages to integrate into an organic unity such disparate musical and visual styles. I believe that only someone who is thinking like an audiovisual composer can do this, someone who is concerned with the effective temporal disposition of music, image and sound. 49

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2001 is an ‘odyssey’, an epic voyage in time and place, and the open nature of the epic form admits the use of a multiplicity of styles in its sweep. Multiple styles are already present in the visual sequences in the film, so a stylistic multiplicity in the use of music and sound is an effective complement to this variety. Kubrick also uses the music for the beginning of Also Sprach Zarathustra to accompany the birth of analogical thinking in humankind: when the hominid for the first time has the idea of using a tool, in the form of an animal bone, which is then used for killing. After committing murder, in triumphal elation the hominid throws the bone high in the air, the bone he has just used as a fatal weapon. Kubrick uses a match cut to leap instantaneously across four million years: from the slow-motion spinning, falling bone to the flying, orbiting space station. And this match cut from bone to space station also functions in itself as an analogy, as both are tools, albeit at opposite ends of human history. Next, when we hear The Blue Danube waltz by Johann Strauss, it doesn’t seem to be stylistically out of place, as it functions as an excellent musical analogy of the circling space station. Kubrick believed that ‘an audience watching a film or a play is in a state very similar to dreaming, and that the dramatic experience becomes a kind of controlled dream’. For him, what is significant about cinema is that it ‘communicates on a subconscious level’ and that ‘the audience responds to the basic shape of the story’ on this level ‘as it responds to a dream’.14 And it is at this subconscious level, with its abrupt and surprising transitions and stylistic diversity, that analogies have their origin, and these analogies play a fundamental part in the effective form of a work in any medium.

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5 Filmic Choreographies: A Backward Glance When Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks describes the similarities between our perception of the visible and of sound, he uses the analogy of a stone thrown into still water: Each body . . . fills the surrounding air with infinite images of itself: just as a stone flung into water becomes the centre and cause of many circles, and just as sound diffuses itself as circles in the air, so any object placed in the luminous atmosphere diffuses itself in circles and fills the surrounding air with images of itself.

He explains the aural phenomenon of our perception of the impact or ‘percussion’ of an echo as being similar to the impact or ‘percussion’ of visual reflections in mirrors as they strike our eye: ‘I say that the sound of the echo is reflected by percussion to the ear, just as the percussions made in mirrors by the images of objects are to the eye.’ He uses the resonant sound of a bell to explain the visual phenomenon of the afterimage, as well as the nature of scent: ‘The stroke in a bell leaves its likeness behind it, impressed, as the sun in the eye or the scent in the air.’ He notices how the peasants of Romagna magnify acoustic resonance: they make ‘large concavities in the mountain in the form of a horn. And on one side they fasten a horn, and this little horn becomes one and the same with the concavity already made, whence is made a great sound.’ 51

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Da Vinci compares the path of light to the eye to the trajectory of a cannonball. The stronger the force of the cannonball or the light, the greater the impact on the body which is affected by it. And he describes the effects of a cannonball fired in a walled space. Its destructive force is augmented by the shock waves it produces: ‘any vessel that is there, or any windows covered by cloth or linen, will be instantly broken . . . and the chicks will perish in their shells.’ So, for Leonardo, the energy of both sound and light is transmitted by a ‘percussion’ which causes waves, which are in themselves patterns of tension and release, or, as he describes them, ‘the friction of the rare against the dense’. To explain the difference in size between the object we see and the tiny pupil in our eye which receives its light, he uses the geometrical image of a pyramid or cone: every object sends its message to the eye by a pyramid of lines . . . that start from the surface and edges of bodies, and converging from a distance, meets in a point. The point is said to be that which having no dimensions cannot be divided, and this point being placed in the eye receives all the points of the cone.

And ‘Each pyramid which is composed of a long convergent beam of rays includes within itself an infinite number of pyramids . . . By these the images of bodies are transmitted through all space in all directions, and each pyramid in itself includes in its minutest part the whole form of the cause.’1 Here Leonardo is describing infinite levels of repetition. He is also dealing with audiovisual movement in patterns which expand and contract: in waves, echoes, resonances and symmetries – all these elements are to be seen and heard in the short films we shall now explore.

John and James Whitney From 1941–44 the American filmmakers John and his brother James Whitney collaborated on a series of films, including five Film Exercises, in which they animated coloured geometrical shapes, structured serially. Their serial structure was derived from the lessons in 12 tone composition John Whitney had with Ren´e Leibowitz in Paris just before World War II. 52

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John Whitney

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The Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg devised a system for composing music in which he used a series of 12 pitches. All the notes in the series were to be used in order, but the series could appear in various forms, including forwards and backwards, in mirror form, or at different levels of pitch, or in combinations of these forms. To compose the music for their Film Exercises, John Whitney invented a pendulum device. From 1941–42 James Whitney also made his own film, Variations on a Circle, visually structured using Schoenberg’s 12 tone serial method.

During World War II, John Whitney worked for Lockheed Aircraft on anti-aircraft gunsight directors. These machines were analogue computers, and they dealt with complex interrelationships between such variables as trajectory distances and parabolic curves, the effects of wind and gravity on the projectile, exit velocities, angles of firing, parallax and relative motion, the timings of the exploding shells, the speeds and directions of the target aircraft. Rapid calculations involving this level of complexity of variables are beyond normal mental arithmetic, so these early computers were devised to increase the effective targeting of the anti-aircraft guns. The types of variables involved in animating the geometrical shapes in the Whitneys’ Film Exercises and in James Whitney’s Variations on a Circle were similar. They involved moving visual elements in space, in all directions, and relating the variety of trajectories of shapes to each other in various ways. These variables effectively comprised a mathematical abstraction of the mechanics of some key aspects of our visual perception, in particular speed, distance, direction of motion and dimension. In 1948 John Whitney was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the combination of graphics and music, particularly music derived from sine tones. This research was a development of his experiments during World War II, when he used his pendulum invention to compose music for the Film Exercises, which won a prize for sound at the First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium in 1949. 53

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In 1956 John Whitney noticed in a war-surplus sale the types of gunsight directors on which he had worked during the war. He bought some and adapted their complex mechanisms to the peaceful making of animated films, mostly for titling films and making commercials. He collaborated with the designers Charles and Ray Eames on their film work, and in 1958 worked with Saul Bass on the title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. The analogue computer John Whitney had invented for making animation greatly reduced the time and vastly repetitive labour needed to make this type of film, where each frame has to be made by hand. His invention made commercial animation economically viable. In 1961 John Whitney made Catalog, a film he combined with music by the American ‘free jazz’ composer and instrumentalist, Ornette Coleman. Catalog is a repertoire of the visual techniques which could be realised using his motion camera analogue computer. One of these was the ‘slit-scan’ technique, later used by Douglas Trumbull in his animation for the ‘Star Gate’ sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Permutations (1968) In 1966 John Whitney took up IBM’s first artist-in-residence position. This gave him access to the company’s digital computer technology, which he used to make Permutations. In this film he combined painstaking handmade animation with digital computer processing, assisted by Dr Jack Citron. Permutations features 281 dots in each frame. Driven by differential equations, the dots generate random textures and geometrical shapes which continually undergo transformations within the frame, presenting various symmetries which collapse and take on new forms. John Whitney described the various kinds of movement he used in Permutations as having parallels in music, in particular counterpoint and polyphony, as the patterns he sets in motion in his film are ‘graphically superimposed forward and backward in many ways’.2 This approach also suggests a visual form of the forward and retrograde forms of Schoenberg’s 12 tones in his serial music. In addition Whitney creates an illusion of three-dimensional space by moving forms towards and away from us, and rotating them. 54

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Whitney saw this process of continual transformation from one form to another as being at the foundation of the organisation of music. For him, ‘the content of music is really motion . . . a matter of generating and resolving tensions . . . by a dynamic process, a continuous matter of motion patterns, a kind of architecture in space and time’.3 Though for Whitney his film is already a kind of music in itself, he combined Permutations with a piece of South Indian classical music played by Sundaram Balachander, the composer, instrumentalist and film director. Whitney explains that all the visual work on Permutations was completed before he chose the piece of music which he combined with it. He finds that ‘there are all these astonishing relations with the music’ and he points out that this is a situation where accidents can work in his favour: ‘you can often make an accident turn into a very wonderful twist to new meaning.’ But he does not believe that the artist should just make an arbitrary decision, it has to be ‘intuitively sound’ and not just based on random factors. For this reason Whitney considered structure not to be a static concept, but one which is dynamic.4 During the 1970s John Whitney made more abstract animated films, using extracts from Terry Riley’s Rainbow in Curved Air as music for two of these: Matrix II and III. His book Digital Harmony, about combining image with sound, was published in 1980. However, John Whitney did believe that ‘it’s kind of cheating to use the music in this way’.5 Ideally, he wanted to compose his own music to his films, ‘as a true integral counterpart’. He was to achieve this aim when, in collaboration with computer programmer Jerry Reed, they devised an audiovisual composition programme, the Whitney-Reed Radius-Differential Theta Differential. He used this programme to make Spirals (1988) and his last work, the Moondrum series (1989–1995), influenced by First Nation art.

James Whitney, Yantra (1957) James Whitney was a painter, so his creative analogies were different from those of his brother. As we have seen, John Whitney was a composer and inventor of complex machines, whose creative analogies were mathematical, related to processes derived from various kinds of differential equations. 55

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After World War II, James Whitney became interested in Indian philosophy, Taoism, quantum physics, alchemy and yoga. He practised meditation and Sumi brush painting, a monochrome ink painting tradition from the Far East. He aimed to find a visual alphabet for the expression of any kind of visual idea. Eventually he chose the dot, or bindu, which can either represent the beginning of creation, or the inexpressible infinite, in the Hindu religious tradition. The point in this context is also a point of focus, moving from the many into one: . . . I reduced the structural mode to the dot-pattern, which gives a quality which in India is called the Akasha, or ether, a subtle element before creation like the Breath of Brahma, the substance that permeates the universe before it begins to break down into the more finite world. That idea as expressed through the dot-pattern was very appealing to me.6

A yantra is a Sanskrit word for a means of focus. In his film Yantra, James Whitney shows a simultaneously contrasting movement, both towards and away from a centre: a combination of tension and release. To make this film, on which he worked from 1950–55, Whitney used a pin to make patterns of thousands of holes in cards, painting through these holes with different colours, to achieve complex and continually changing patterns of moving dots. In Yantra a sense of vast scale is implied, as the random quivering dots appear to exist well beyond the frame, and it’s only when geometrical forms arise that they appear trembling within the limits of the screen, before they explode into the random mode again. These cycles of order and disorder suggest, as in the films of his brother, a choreography of dots, but on a larger scale. Jordan Belson, another American abstract filmmaker and friend of James Whitney, added to Yantra an electronic piece by the Dutch composer Henk Badings. The choreographer J. Zielstra had used this music, based on a conflict between opposing forces, for his dance Cain and Abel for the Netherlands Ballet in 1956. The opposing forces of order and chaos in James Whitney’s choreography of dots are audiovisually combined by this organic oppositional structure, common to both Yantra and the music by Badings. 56

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In 1963, when James Whitney began work on painting dots on glass plates to make Lapis, he was able to use a specially adapted machine, developed with his brother John, which enabled him to make his new film much more rapidly. He completed Lapis in 1966 and a recording of the raga jogiya, performed by Ravi Shankar, was combined with the film. James Whitney originally thought of Lapis as being Yantra II. At this time much work was made in series. Each piece was considered to be a section from a continuing process of creative and experimental research, and numbered with Roman numerals, as in Available Forms I and II, by the American composer Earle Brown.7 This working method was applied to any medium, including film, paintings, sculptures, and music. The concept behind this creative approach was related to the idea of scientific research – art, like science, was thought of as a series of experiments which were not considered to have a conclusion, or even a beginning, but were simply part of a continuing process of investigation.

FILMIC CHOREOGRAPHIES: A BACKWARD GLANCE

Lapis (1966)

Wu Ming (1977) After making Lapis, James Whitney went through a period of making raku pottery, resulting in a series of films each associated with the elements of fire, water, air and earth. Dwija (1973), Sanskrit for ‘twice born’, is associated with fire, and Wu Ming, a Chinese Tao expression meaning ‘no name’, is associated with water. In Wu Ming James Whitney makes use of ‘clear projection light’ and afterimage effects, which create ambiguities of perception: what is actually being shown on the screen? What is happening in the viewer’s eyes, and in the space between eye and screen? Whitney describes two kinds of energy that he expresses in this film, in the form of a black ‘particle’ which disappears by entering a ‘pure white field’ from which ‘an entirely different kind of energy radiates in expanding wave rings, IN as particle, OUT as wave’.8 Here again there is the tension/release structure: the tension created by the disappearing dot is released in the expanding rings of waves, the visual realisation of a wave equation. These waves are in themselves 57

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patterns of tension and release: as Leonardo da Vinci describes them, the ‘friction of the rare against the dense’.

Two examples of wave patterns in music Wave patterns, which build tension through repetition, followed by a breaking release of energy, are also present in music, as was mentioned earlier, by John Whitney. Here are two examples of such wave structures in music, from different traditions: 1. Felix Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides Overture (1830). This piece was inspired by the young composer’s visit to Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa, off the west coast of Scotland. Mendelssohn uses repetition to create tension in the form of musical patterns he derived from both the visual forms of the waves, as well as the echoes of the sounds of waves in the vast cave. This tension is released in his swelling and accented crashing chords which are a rendering in music of the waves breaking against the rocks. Slavko Vorkapich and John Hoffman made a film, titled Moods of the Sea (1941), of ocean waves by the shore, edited to Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides Overture. 2. Mwandido Nyboma’s Amour Perdu (1988), in Moyibi, an album performed by Nyboma and Peppe Kalle. In this Congolese soukous dance, a pattern of interlocked repetition is set up and maintained. This technique inexorably builds tension, which is released about two minutes into the piece, in a cascading melodic pattern, for the guitars. This technique of repetition and release is used again with melodic variations, which in themselves have the rolling wave-like interlocking rhythmic patterns, characteristic of the soukous dances.

Len Lye, Colour Flight (1938) A film made by the New Zealand artist and filmmaker Len Lye, Colour Flight was a commission from John Grierson of the British GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit. It was an advertisement for Imperial Airways, which included their early airmail service. 58

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The music is a collage of popular band music from the period, in particular two dances: Rumba Negra played by the Lecuona Cuban Boys, and Honolulu Blues, performed by Red Nichols and his Five Pennies.9 Len Lye creates a fantastically energetic and colourful dance of shapes, lines and textures to this music. In it can be seen abstractions of an aeroplane/bird (the logo of Imperial Airways) flying about in groups; stars, shooting stars, waves, clouds, suns, as well as geometrical shapes: dots, lines, arrows and a crescent shape, which could be a smile or a boat. Everything is made to dance in his film, even the texts for the advertisement. All the shapes have a rough-edged quality which increases their dynamism. Lye’s pioneering technique of painting directly on film, of using stencils, has a directness, a brash and lively humour which is also there in the music. Using these shapes and colours, he himself is dancing exuberantly to the collage-like dance music, with its lively syncopations, sudden tempo changes and unexpected stylistic transitions. As an art student in Wellington, New Zealand, when he was only 15, Len Lye had an epiphany which was to provide the nature of his future unique contribution to film and kinetic sculpture: It had been raining all night, and there were these marvellous fast little skuddy clouds in the blue sky. As I was looking at those clouds I was thinking, wasn’t it Constable who sketched clouds to try to convey their motions? Well, I thought, why clouds, why not just motion? Why pretend they are moving, why not just move something? All of a sudden it hit me – if there was such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion. After all, there are melodic figures, why can’t there be figures of motion?10

In this description there’s a complete unity between the visual and music. Lye began to draw movement. Inevitably this led to drawing the passage of time: he would choose a subject where movement was innate in its construction, like a boat’s mast reflected in water. First he would draw the wiggly line down one side of the mast, then draw the wiggly line on the other side, finally drawing the wiggly line of the centre of the mast. He would apply this three-part method to other kinds of repetitive movements, missing out the middle ‘spinal’ line, as 59

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what he was drawing had moved, unlike the mast, from one place to another. This awareness of the interaction of time, shape and space led him in turn to another medium: dance. His engagement with seeing tended to be linked to the movements of his body. He remembers lying outstretched on the deck of a yacht, watching the billowing sail above, and feeling along his body the movement of the boat negotiating the movement of the waves. Then suddenly a yellow butterfly flits from behind the white sail into the blue – the simultaneous combination of physically sensing the very different movements of boat, sea, sail and butterfly gives him an immediate shock: as if he was being split into two with a meat-cleaver, as he vividly describes his sensation. His physical engagement when studying motion led him to choreographically transfer the movements he observed to various parts of his body, for example: – a breaking wave: the shoulder – a cat stretching its back: the instep of the foot – the pitching and rolling of a boat’s deck: the tightening of the muscles of the stomach.11 He developed this approach to his perception of observed movements to the extent that he could ‘feel’ or empathise himself ‘into the shoes of anything that moved, from a grasshopper to a hawk, a fish to a yacht, from a cloud to the shimmering rustle of ivy leaves on a brick wall. Such shoes were around in profusion . . . ’ He realised that ‘this is what dancers do’, but he wanted to go further, in order to be able to observe these movement characteristics from the outside.12 He applied his awareness of such movements on the occasions when he did manual work outdoors for a living: ‘I didn’t move an inch without consciously trying to feel my various muscles working in rhythm while I enjoyed the motions my body made, shovelling, riding, sewing up wheat bags.’ He also applied this approach to movements on a smaller scale: the way opposite ends of a pen moved as he wrote, how his ‘eyeballs moved in their sockets’ as he read a text. He realised that ‘There isn’t a motion that one cannot isolate and feel in relation to one’s own solid body.’13 Not finding any reference to the depiction of motion in his art school classes, Lye researched the depiction of movement in art in

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his local library, and discovered a whole artistic revolution which was taking place in Europe: the work of the Futurists, as well as Cubism, Expressionism, the Constructivists and the Vorticists. These new and dynamic developments did not exist for the art schools in New Zealand, as they primarily concentrated on developing skills in their students for commercial illustration and craft-based work, to prepare them for the work-place.14 Already an avid jazz fan, Lye became fascinated by the implications for movement in African sculpture, the art which had inspired Picasso, Braque and Matisse and their Cubist disciples. Gauguin led Lye to the art of the Pacific Islands, and in the Canterbury Museum he found Maori art from New Zealand and aboriginal art from Australia. The combination of the European avant-garde with traditional art and music from various African cultures, the Pacific Islands, Australian aboriginal and Maori cultures was to remain a powerful and continuous influence in all his work, both in film and in his kinetic sculptures.15 In 1922 he moved to Sydney, Australia: he felt that at that time he could develop no further as an artist in the small towns of New Zealand. In the larger scale urban environment of Sydney he mixed with artists, writers, actors and musicians, worked as a commercial artist, and continued his research in libraries and museums. Seeing a documentary about Papua New Guinea prompted Lye to think in terms of making films, as a way of resolving his problem with composing motion. He found a job making animations for an advertisement company, Filmads, in Sydney. When he wasn’t working on assignments he was able to observe characteristics of the film medium which others would not consider of interest. For example, he noticed how scratches on film leaders would move around – unintentional animation. He began scratching on film and projecting these experiments after his co-workers had gone home. He was very excited by the results: ‘try sometime the exhilaration of discovering your own motion imagery. I can still feel the effect of that moment in my heart muscles somewhere.’ This transformative experience, though he wasn’t to use this specific animation technique until he made Free Radicals in 1958, was nevertheless the start of his working directly on film strips, making camera-less films.16 At this time Lye read Freud’s Totem and Taboo, and in a Freudinfluenced book on psychopathology he found a photo of a ‘perpetual

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motion’ machine made by a patient, based on a pulley-belt mechanism. This image gave him the idea to construct his own pulley-belt machine to set in motion various abstract shapes, including Australian aboriginal designs, combining them at different speeds on the variously rotating wheels, using a crank he had sourced from a wind-up gramophone, and a mirror to view the results. This ‘kinetic theatre’, an early form of kinetic sculpture, would enable him to explore the effects of various kinds of imagery he would later use in films: ‘whether it should be dots or dashes or stripes or shapes or whatever the form should be.’17 Lye returned to New Zealand in 1924, and did manual jobs to save for a Cook’s tour of the Pacific Islands. He found a job in Samoa and stayed there for six to eight months. He lived with local people and gained valuable first-hand experience of a culture beyond his European roots. But at the same time, through a friendly American missionary who subscribed to Time Magazine, Lye was able to intermittently access contemporary developments in art in Europe. Back in Sydney, in the Winter 1926 issue of The Little Review he saw a photograph of Lyubov Popova’s set design for Meyerhold’s first Constructivist production, in 1922, of Crommelynck’s play The Magnanimous Cuckold. Lye was inspired by this design to make an attempt to go to Russia: ‘I wanted to get hell bent to where they were using those types of decors in the theatre, because that is the kind of thing I wanted to produce.’18 Failing to achieve his goal of going to Moscow, in 1926 Lye worked his passage to London as a coal trimmer on a steamship. Once settled in London, he found work as a stage hand at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith. He then became involved in the Seven and Five group of artists led by Ben Nicholson, whose enthusiasm for the avant-garde art from Paris he shared. Lye also became friends with the poet Robert Graves and his companion Laura Riding. He designed covers for books they published under their imprint, the Seizin Press, which included a book of Lye’s own writings, No Trouble.19 Lye joined the London Film Society, and he made his first animation film, Tusalava, based on Australian aboriginal motifs; the first nine minutes of his film was shown by the Society in 1929. Lye explained the importance of his use of dots in Tusalava: ‘Dots are used to convey organic life in a primary stage. All the shapes [ . . . ] are derived from dots. Dots are an age-old motif.’ Painting directly on to film, Lye made Colour Box (1935), a film advertisement for the British GPO, which

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he combined with La Belle Cr´eole, performed by Don Baretto and his Cuban Orchestra. The success of Colour Box prompted John Grierson of the GPO Film Unit to commission from Lye a series of equally colourful animated films which enabled him to try out a wide variety of pioneering animation techniques. Lye was also commissioned to add some colour to the flames in the train crash at the end of Hitchcock’s film The Secret Agent (1936), to make the crash more horrific. Hitchcock admired Eisenstein’s dramatic use of colour in The Battleship Potemkin, when the Communist flag on the ship is coloured red. Lye not only added colour to the flames in the train crash, but went further and imitated the effect of film melting and burning in the projector. Hitchcock appreciated this addition, but the effect had to be removed, as at some screenings the audience would flee, expecting a fire in the cinema. In 1936 Lye exhibited three paintings and two photograms at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London.20 Lye was invited to be a director for The March of Time newsreel series in 1939, and he made a number of documentaries. He moved to the United States in 1944 and settled in New York. He concentrated on making kinetic sculptures, as well as film projections combined with jazz at the Five Spot Caf´e, frequented by jazz musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane. The cafe also attracted artists, poets and writers like Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Willem de Kooning, David Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and Jack Kerouac. There Lye provided a ‘light show’ for Count Basie’s band, and he superimposed a film over a blown-up black and white photograph of Charlie Parker performing his music. He projected films with performances of poetry, and mixed dance with film. During this period Lye was friends with the filmmakers Maya Deren and Hans Richter, the painters Joan Mir´o and Georgia O’Keefe, and the poet Dylan Thomas. He collaborated with the American composer Henry Brant, and in 1957 they organised an ‘All Souls Carnival’ concert at the Carnegie Recital Hall with music by Stravinsky, Milhaud and Brant, performed with Lye’s animations on a back-projected screen. A New York Times critic noted that this live audiovisual combination was ‘not indissolubly synchronised’ and that the result was in turn ‘charming, poignant, playful, and faintly mocking’. A critic for the New York Herald Tribune noticed the choreographic element in this

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audiovisual combination: ‘the film was quite ravishing, its iridescent shapes and forms aburst with vivid colours; and no less vivid were the sonorities conjured up by Mr Brant to assist the images as they danced by.’21

Free Radicals (1958) With Free Radicals, named after unstable atoms and molecules, Lye returned to the idea of scratching on film, which he had first tried out at Filmads in Sydney, over 30 years earlier. For this film, Lye makes his line move in three dimensions with graphic virtuosity; he described this as working with ‘3, 21/2 , or 2D’. He conjures up a solo dancer, groups of dancers, landscapes, snakes, caterpillars and other creatures in motion. All these fleeting images merge and transform into each other seamlessly, as in cloud-created shapes, but at a much greater speed. 22 Lye thought audiovisually: as a youngster he deliberately made himself conscious of both vision and sound. For him the sound of a dog’s bark waking him up in the morning would signal a day of sound – the sunlight waking him would result in a day of light. Dance was the result of the combination of sound and light. He would capture its rhythms in the physical process of making Free Radicals. His wife noticed his unusual movements when he was scratching the strip of black leader film – this is how Lye described what he was doing and why: ‘I wriggled my whole body to get a compressed feeling into my shoulders – trying to get a pent-up feeling of precision into the fingers, and with a sudden jump I pulled the needle through the celluloid and completed my design.’ He would hold the needle with both hands, and though this would mean that he had a diminished view of what he was doing, it gave him a certain impetus to keep moving to the next frame, resulting in a line with a more rhythmic dance-like motion. The music for Free Radicals is a dance for a drum, maracas, and a few solo sung phrases, from the Bagirmi people of Chad; it’s a homage to Yoruba, the god of thunder. The visual rhythms of Len Lye’s dancing lines wind round the syncopated drum rhythms in interweaving audiovisual patterns. The spare but energetic quality of the music is matched by Lye limiting himself to white scratched lines on black. For him this music had ‘the same kind of feeling to it, the same resonance,

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Norman McLaren, Begone Dull Care (1949) Begone Dull Care was drawn and painted directly on to film by Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, and combined with the music of the Oscar Peterson Trio. McLaren, like Lye, made animated films during the 1930s for the documentary filmmaker John Grierson, at the GPO Film Unit. When he was an art student, McLaren was amazed when he saw Len Lye’s film Colour Box, made in 1935. Lye had made it by painting directly onto the film. In Begone Dull Care techniques involving scratching and painting on film are similar to those methods used by Lye in his animations of the 1930s, like Colour Box and Kaleidoscope (1935), Trade Tattoo (1937), and Colour Flight (1938). But in audiovisual terms the painted films of McLaren are very different from Len Lye’s work: for example in Begone Dull Care the film’s visual gestures are frequently synchronised with the accents in the jazz music of the composer and pianist Oscar Peterson. Though McLaren’s visual elements dance, because of this audiovisual synchronisation his film begins to look like an illustration of the music. McLaren developed a way of composing his own music for his films, by processing the optical track. In Synchromy (1971) he produces a more extreme synthesis between his visual and musical gestures, a kind of abstract ‘Mickey Mousing’.

FILMIC CHOREOGRAPHIES: A BACKWARD GLANCE

the same attack’ as his animation. Lye had the music printed as an optical sound track on the black film leader on which he scratched the emulsion. This track helped him to understand the structure and characteristics of the music. Sometimes he would use the patterns in the optical track as ideas for his visual imagery, but he wouldn’t necessarily imitate them directly – he called these visual impulses ‘a little seed in the brain for germination’. He felt that his best work was made when he had ‘entered a kind of rhythmic trance’.23

Visual/sound correspondence The practice of what came to be known as Mickey Mousing arose from Walt Disney’s animations, where each action is underlined by a synchronised sound, or with synchronised accents in the music 65

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combined with the cartoon. The comical element is thus audiovisually underlined. The visual surprise is nearly always amusingly emphasised in sound. However, someone being hit over the head with a frying pan isn’t accompanied by the awful sound of cracking bone, but only by the hollow sound of the pan hitting something hard. And the cartoon characters always immediately come back to life as if nothing had happened to them – part of the comic relief in this genre. This close link between sound and image is something which we have been accustomed to accept as being always present in our far from fictional everyday life. And for a very good reason: sound is one of the key warnings our senses have in a situation which could be a threat to our personal safety. Animals are also sensitive in this way: just look at what most cats do when you turn on your vacuum cleaner. As sensitive creatures, we are conditioned to believe that sound protects us from danger, and so it’s a small step to believing that everything that moves makes a sound. But this is not always the case: for example a cat moves with a minimum of sound, unless it accidentally knocks something over. It is at this point that there is a divergence between two different approaches to dealing with the audiovisual in cinema. The norm in cinema is that the noises people and things make must be synchronised audiovisually. The clearest example is ‘lip-synch’, where the sounds of the words exactly match the movement of the mouth of the person uttering them in the film. This audiovisual approach appears to be completely normal, and so audiovisual synchronisation is applied to everything we see in the film. Consequently all that we see there, if it moves, makes the sound which fits with that object, or person. The second approach diverges from this concept, in that it takes into account that many sounds we hear in everyday life are completely separate from our visual perception. We may hear a sound somewhere outside, an unfamiliar sound which warns us that something is amiss. Most often (fortunately) the sound is familiar and therefore not a sign of a potential threat. But in both cases, the thing which makes the sound is at first invisible. And in many cases we often hear sounds before we see what or who is making them, whether it’s a voice, someone moving, or the sound of objects we or others are moving around. Actually seeing and hearing something at the same time is perhaps not something which happens as frequently as would be expected.

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Norman McLaren, Pas de Deux (1968)

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A drawing in a conventional naturalistic style, where everything seen by the artist is matched by a visual gesture drawn on the paper, may be easily recognisable, but does it match how we see things? Such a naturalistic drawing style tends to be static, as the element of time is absent, the subject is frozen – it becomes like a ‘still life’. And in cinema, even though time is central to our experience of it, something similar happens: if everything that we see moving in a film makes a noise at the same time as we see it, then the result is an inaccurate and static expression of the flux of our daily audiovisual perceptions, and therefore as inaccurate as a static naturalistic drawing.

Pas de Deux features two dancers performing a ballet. In it McLaren uses white lighting against a black background to give us a sense that these ethereal dancers exist in a world of their own, like two lovers for whom the outside world disappears in their concentration on each other. To underline this ecstatic sensation McLaren adds an effect achieved by the repeated step printing of film frames, creating visual breakdowns of the movements of each dancer through space. This is a technique Len Lye used in a more rough and ready way in his Rainbow Dance (1936), using different colours for each interrupted stage of the movement of his dancer. In Pas de Deux McLaren uses edge lighting to highlight the contours of the bodies of the dancers in lines of light, so that when their images break into multiples of themselves, their successive movements through space are also highlighted. The source of the music for Pas de Deux is a piece for panpipes performed by Dobre Constantin, accompanied by the United Folk Orchestra Romania. This music appears to have been assembled from repeated extracts from the recording, making the piece quite slow. The leisurely pace and repetition in the music are in parallel to the slow elegant moves of the ballet dancers, and the bright multitudinous repetitions of their shapes through black space. However, if you remove this music and replace it with a lively sonata by Domenico Scarlatti played on the harpsichord, the movements of the dance in the film are transformed. Many of Scarlatti’s sonatas are dance music, and so his trills and other ornaments form an audiovisually scintillating interaction with the florid fan-like repetitions 67

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McLaren has drawn out from the images of his dancers. The Baroque music highlights the details in the performers’ graceful movements – including the tiniest gestures of their hands and even their fingers, which now become clear, having previously been dulled by the slow repetitive surges of orchestral sound in the originally chosen music. The vigorous dance music by Scarlatti highlights the slow and graceful movements of the dancers, so that the ecstatic elements of their dance become heightened. The eye and the ear no longer parallel each other, instead they give each other room for chance audiovisual encounters. This substitution of another piece of music for Pas de Deux is an act of desecration. However, for the purpose of studying the audiovisual, such substitutions can be very illuminating, as they reveal whole new perspectives of possibilities in audiovisual combinations. In terms of a vocabulary of movement, McLaren’s Pas de Deux provides a spectacle of patterns involving graceful spirals, movements circular and spinning, falling and rising, elliptical and parabolic curves, complex textures which coalesce and split apart. In Pas de Deux McLaren is closer to the meditative films of the Whitney brothers than to the bracing vigour of Len Lye’s films. For example, Lye in his Free Radicals (1958) also makes use of white lines on black, and his film is also choreographic, but its raw audiovisual energy is a world away from the balletic grace and poise of McLaren’s dancers.

Busby Berkeley In Pas de Deux, McLaren’s use of patterns involving extensive repetition and various geometrical shapes in motion has more in common with the dance routines of the choreographer and film director Busby Berkeley. In Berkeley’s dance routines there are also the transitions from figurative to abstracted forms. Recognisably human dancers become abstracted through an extreme high angle shot: they become part of interweaving circular, spiral, or expanding and contracting movements, which in turn bring to mind the waving motion of sea anemones, or flowers opening and closing in stop frame animation. When Berkeley outlines the edges of violins in neon light, held and ‘played’ by the dancers, in the ‘Shadow Waltz’ from Gold Diggers of 68

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1933, he moves them from a circular geometrical arrangement into a huge violin, which can only be seen effectively from an extreme high angle shot. His idea of outlining the violin shape, white lines against black, and animating these shapes is not too far from McLaren’s visual technique in Pas de Deux, made more than three decades later in 1968. Excess is fundamental in Busby Berkeley – and large numbers are a very important part of the success of his dance routines. As a young man, Berkeley was educated at Mohegan Lake Military Academy, where drills were an important part of the training. After leaving the Academy, Berkeley went to work for a shoe manufacturer in Athol, Massachusetts. In his spare time he was active as an actor and director of plays in the local opera house, but he also led the local Home Guard three nights a week, practising formation drills with 150 men. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Berkeley signed up and went to France to be trained as a Second Lieutenant in the Artillery. His talent for leading formation drills was noticed, and he progressed to directing 1,200 men, moving them around in separate groups, then coordinating them as one mass of unified motion.24 There was a call for volunteers for the newly formed United States Army Air Service, and Berkeley joined it as an aerial observer, gaining experience in military reconnaissance. After the end of the war, Berkeley directed musicals, comedies and dramas for the American occupying forces in Germany, and, on his return home, he continued to work in the theatre. In 1928 he went on a tour of a Ford motor plant, to see advanced mass production in action: the integration of the movements of large numbers of workers, their movements choreographed to the timed assembly of vehicles.25 Just after the Wall Street Crash in 1929, Berkeley made the transition to cinema. His experiences of directing large-scale formation drills, observation from aerial vantage points, witnessing large-scale assembly line production, and acting in and directing musicals and plays, were ideal for directing dance routines for films. In cinema, unlike in theatre, any performance can be seen from any angle. When Berkeley began to direct in Hollywood, he noted the presence of four cameras on the set, to shoot simultaneously from four different directions, and at several distances. He quickly realised that this multi-camera set-up would make his dance-routine visualisations too complex for him to manage, so he decided to use just one camera for his work.26

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Having access to a situation where any point of view is possible creates the problem of how to deal with this level of variability. At the same time, this dilemma is both a question of choice of movement and how we perceive movement in general. Len Lye, a contemporary of Busby Berkeley, was also confronted with this basic problem, and we saw how he built a machine so that he could experiment with the dynamic interaction of shapes arranged in different combinations. John Whitney’s various machines, at first a pendulum device, then a type of analogue computer, then an IBM digital computer with a specially devised programme, were all invented to deal with a high level of variability. Whitney used them to find ways to create and to control continuously changing patterns and textures, where chaotic movements are resolved into recognisable geometries in motion, before they in turn break down into other transformations of movements and shapes. Berkeley invented a revolving stage with concentric circles which could rotate in opposite directions, so his dancers could pass each other without themselves having to move. He also invented a mechanical system which combined the smooth motion of a camera on a track, with the raising and lowering that a crane makes possible. This invention consisted of rails which rose from the floor of the studio to its roof, with a camera attached and room for a camera person to operate it. Most of Berkeley’s famous extreme high angle shots were achieved with a crane until he had invented his inclined rail system. The other extreme high angle shots needed to be so high that he had to have holes made in the studio roof to get the effect he wanted. These shots from overhead flatten the space and so make the changing patterns made by the dancers’ movements more abstract, and liable to suggest floral images or even a giant violin. The more abstract patterns in motion bring to mind some of the transforming geometries the Whitney brothers created later, using large numbers of dots.27 Berkeley’s dance routines were hugely successful – for audiences they were a welcome escape from the bleak realities of the Great Depression. Consequently his studio bosses were generous, allocating vast budgets for his big sets, large numbers of dancers, equipment, and extravagant costumes. Sometimes rehearsals in the studio would take all night, as work on this scale and complexity needed time. Studio

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boss Sam Goldwyn once asked Berkeley why a certain scene had not yet been shot. Without hesitation Berkeley told him that the leotards for the horses were not yet ready – Goldwyn immediately rang the costume department to demand the reason for the delay with the horses’ leotards.28 The same level of complexity, in addition to the time-consuming labour of creating each frame by hand, meant that the film animations of Len Lye, Norman McLaren, and John and James Whitney often took them years to make. In the title dance sequence in Dames (1934), Berkeley has one of his dancers soar up towards us to drop a black ball in the middle of the other dancers far below, all dressed in white, to create a pattern of rings of dancers radiating outwards, seen from an extreme high angle. This movement sequence brings to mind Leonardo da Vinci’s analogy for the diffusion of light and sound: a stone thrown into still water, which becomes ‘the centre and cause of many circles’. And much later, James Whitney describes a black particle in his film Wu Ming (1977), which disappears as it enters a ‘pure white field’, from which ‘an entirely different kind of energy radiates in expanding wave rings, IN as particle, OUT as wave’. In the dance sequence ‘By a Waterfall’, from the film Footlight Parade (1933), Berkeley again makes use of an extreme high angle shot and the possibilities of having the dancers move about horizontally, floating in a pool. Towards the end of this sequence the dancers move in chains of crawling snake-like shapes, reminiscent of Len Lye’s crawling grub-like forms in his animation film Tusalava (1929). Berkeley’s baroque imagination was also touched by other aspects of Dada and Surrealism. For example, he borrowed the strange image of a woman viewed from the top of her head, smoking a cigarette, from a photograph by the American Surrealist artist Man Ray. He used this symmetrical image for shots at the beginning and at the end of his dance sequence, ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ from Gold Diggers of 1935. In a brief shot in this sequence we see a tap dancer’s shoes shot from below, through a glass floor, from a surrealistically low angle. Dancing on a glass floor seen from below also occurs in Ren´e Clair’s film Entr’acte (1924), where a ballet dancer pirouettes and leaps, her tutu opening out and closing like a flower – an effect Berkeley later

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recreated using multiple dancers shot from an extreme high angle, in Gold Diggers of 1933. The erotic aspect of the shot from below in Entr’acte is matched by the eroticism of the cannon and the dancing machines in another avant-garde film from 1924, Ballet M´ecanique, by the artist Fernand L´eger, which he made in collaboration with American filmmaker Dudley Murphy, Man Ray, and the American composer Georges Antheil. In Berkeley’s mass tap dance sequence from ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ in Gold Diggers of 1935, the dancers are at the same time the performers of the music, so that there is a one-on-one relationship between moving image and music: the result is like a military tap dance. Music is as central to dance as it is fundamental to the film animations we have been exploring. Both these films and their choreographies share the use of basic shapes and patterns, colours and textures, in motion. And these films share with music the process of tension and release.

Jules Etienne Marey Understanding the choreography of the human body in motion was one of the first preoccupations of the nineteenth-century scientists who made cinema possible. For example, we can look at Jules Etienne Marey’s studies from the 1880s, and see the abstractions he made of the human body in motion, an idea used much later in 1968 by McLaren in Pas de Deux. In conceptual terms there is also a parallel with the machines John Whitney and Len Lye devised, in order that they could investigate how any movement works in practice. What began as a scientific research technique in the 1880s became film art around 80 years later in 1968. As early as Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of our visual and aural perception, artists and artist-scientistmathematicians have been exploring how movement works, and how we perceive it. Cinema was born of machines devised to study human and animal motion. And so it is not a surprise that abstract films or animations (I prefer to call them ‘filmic choreographies’) reflect their joint origin in mechanical, animal and human movement.

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6 Maya Deren: Meshes of the Audiovisual Music, Image and Sound in Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, 1959) Maya Deren’s first film, Meshes of the Afternoon, was made in two and a half weeks in Los Angeles, on location in ideal continuously sunny weather, involving only Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid in its shooting and production.1 This good weather made possible a highly effective use of shadows, reminiscent of the shadows one sees in the paintings of Salvador Dali. Other Dalinesque elements in Meshes of the Afternoon include fetishistic objects like a telephone, an artificial flower, a key, a knife, a loaf of bread, a white tablecloth with isolated objects on it. There are also obsessive repetitions: climbing stairs, pushing open a door, isolated figures in empty spaces with their faces often hidden, apparitions in bright sunlight. Close-ups on a hand, mouth and eye are simultaneously sensual and oneirically disturbing. Meshes of the Afternoon was made as a silent film; music was only added much later, in 1959, by the Japanese composer Teiji Ito, Deren’s third husband. She tells us that Ito composed his music for her film in the Japanese tradition of the bugaku, a dance performance involving elaborate costumes and sometimes masks, and repetition of sections of music and movement. The dances were for the elite, and were not performed outside courtly environments. The music for these dances is called gagaku, and it is played by a small ensemble with a 73

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set combination of instruments. Deren points out that, in Meshes of the Afternoon, Ito’s ‘Oriental music has been used for an Occidental setting’ which was the opposite of what was until then a normal audiovisual practice in cinema. Hollywood film composers would mix the prevalent nineteenth-century European orchestral style with an oversimplified imitation of an imagined Far Eastern style for films set in China or Japan.2 Ito’s music for Meshes of the Afternoon is scored for a small ensemble, based on the gagaku instrumental combination. There’s a flute, a koto (a kind of harp), a bamboo mouth organ, a small drum, and some metallic percussion. The music appears in the very beginning of the film, as part of the title sequence. The koto is heard first, on its own. The music is modal and is used very sparingly, but it is very much present, unlike the Hollywood convention of ‘underscoring’, which results in film music which is continually present in the background, so that after a while much of it is hardly noticed. Conventionally it unwinds almost inaudibly behind conversations and only emerges in stock audiovisual gestures in action sequences. Due to its modal nature Ito’s music provides a sensation of floating, already there in the film: the music is equal in expression to the visual track. At times the music is directly associated with the visual image, as in a leitmotif. For example, the surprising raw tones of the bamboo mouth organ, supplemented with humming, are associated with the mysterious hooded figure, but not always, as our first view of this apparition takes place in complete silence. When the mysterious woman (played by Deren herself ) drops her door key, it falls down the steps; its striking against the concrete surface coincides with the sound of the small drum being struck. But then the beats of the drum diverge from the sounds we would expect to hear as the key falls further, and the drum beats accelerate away from the visual accents we are seeing. This move away from audiovisual synchronisation emphasises two things: that the music is both connected with, yet independent of, the visual track, and that it has an increased power as it’s the only sound other than silence (but is that a soft click we hear as Deren snaps shut her purse?). The accelerating beat is a characteristic musical element in Japanese dance and theatre music. Here it defeats our expectation of continuing to hear the key bouncing down the steps.

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At first we think that it’s an oddly resonant sound for a key dropped on a concrete surface, as if what we are hearing is part of a dream. But then what we expect is further changed audiovisually when the drum beats diverge and go their own way. Expectation defeated is fundamental in this film. Similarly, we see close-ups of Deren’s feet as she steps magically from the house to the beach, to the dunes, to the path, back to the house in just a few single steps. Are there two Derens? Or three? Or four? The mirror masked figure is never caught up with, as in a dream. Once again, expectation is defeated. The beginning of the film, usually the part which is the most easily forgotten, is impossible. It is only made possible by the framing of the shot: an unnaturally long arm descends godlike from above, to leave an artificial flower on the ground. Like the flower, it’s a fake: it’s an arm from a mannequin. A single beat from the small drum is sufficient to make it disappear altogether – this kind of sudden and expressively spare use of audiovisual synchronisation is found in performances in the Kabuki theatre tradition. The complete lack of audible conversation in the film heightens our perception of the movement of its protagonists, which extends to the movement of objects like the bedroom curtains floating in the breeze, and the key which unexpectedly comes out of Deren’s mouth. This choreographic element is very important in the film, and it even extends to a choreography of the camera. In one instance the camera is swayed from side to side, so that Deren appears to have difficulty climbing a staircase which sways as if it’s on a ship in a bad storm at sea.3 In addition, the camera’s movements create an ambiguity of space – is Deren clutching on to a ledge, or is she pushing away from it? Which way is up, or down? Our views, based on her points of view, and Hammid’s points of view, are fragmentary, just like Ito’s music. As Deren looks out of the bedroom window, we see her from the outside. Due to the reflections in the window her hair blends with the trees and the sky. David Lynch has a variation of this striking image at the beginning of his film Lost Highway, which features a house that also has steps leading up to it, and which shares the ambiguity of its interior spaces with the house in Meshes of the Afternoon, as well as the ambiguous identities of its main characters. The silence in Meshes of the Afternoon is heightened by our view of a record being played on a record-player, but it’s frustrating as we cannot

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hear the music from it. However, this lack of music is compensated by certain rhythmic dance elements which appear in the extraordinary slow motion section, but not too slow, in which we see a close-up of Deren’s feet as she leaps up the stairs in the house, as if she’s moving under water.4 You can almost hear her gliding steps, synaesthetically in the silence. Our aural imagination works to supply these ghostly sounds in the silent parts of the film. In Meshes of the Afternoon the choreographed movements of Deren and Hammid are heightened by silence. For Deren, dance is heightened movement, as song is heightened speech. She called her films ‘choreographic’, referring ‘to the design and stylisation of movement which confers ritual dimension upon functional motion – just as simple speech is made into song when affirmation or intensification is intended’.5 Deren called Meshes of the Afternoon her ‘point of departure’. She explains that up till that point she had been a poet, but with her discovery of filmmaking she had found a way of directly expressing the images in her mind, instead of having the problems she had previously had with translating images into words. In 1941 she joined Katherine Dunham’s African-American dance company as a manager. She developed an already existing interest in dance, and became fascinated by Haitian culture, influenced by Dunham’s research into this major source of inspiration for her choreography and her teaching of dance. In Los Angeles, Deren met Alexander Hammid, a Czech avant-garde and documentary filmmaker. Like Deren, who was born in Kiev, he had emigrated to the United States. They got married in 1942, and together they shot and edited Meshes of the Afternoon.6 Teiji Ito, who at Deren’s request composed the music for Meshes of the Afternoon, was born in Tokyo in 1935. He came from a theatrical family: his father was a composer and costume designer, and his mother a dancer. They arrived in the United States when Ito was six years old. He learned to play various instruments and began composing aged 17. He met Maya Deren and shared her interest in Haitian traditional music and dance. From 1947 to 1951 Deren had undertaken three research trips to Haiti, on a Guggenheim Fellowship. She filmed, photographed and recorded religious ceremonies there. In 1955, Deren and Ito travelled to Haiti, where Ito studied with a master drummer. They married in 1960, but Deren died from a cerebral haemorrhage in 1961, aged 44. Ito went on to work as a composer of incidental

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music for Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, including composing the music for King Ubu (1961), for the Living Theatre. In 1979, with his fourth wife, Cherel Winett, Teiji Ito edited Deren’s extensive Haitian film footage, to make the documentary Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. In 1982, on a return visit to Haiti, Ito died of a heart attack, aged 46.7 Teiji Ito often composed by overdubbing on tape his playing of various instruments, a technique which is already apparent in his music for Meshes of the Afternoon.8 Deren also used overdubbing when she combined a recording of Chinese music for flute with one of her recordings of Haitian drumming, in her film Meditation on Violence (1948), which features a boxer performing Wu Tang and Shaolin martial arts training exercises.9 This compositional method of overdubbing fits well with Maya Deren’s aesthetic of independent self-realisation. She had the freedom to make such an unusual musical combination, as she did not work within the context of the film industry, with its expensive sets, its managers, its professional actors, its complex lighting and sound rigs, multiple cameras and tracks, large orchestras, and the risk of being sacked. 10 Instead she worked with her friends and acted in her own films, used as interiors her own home, the apartments of her friends, an unrented ballroom, a space in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.11 She replaced the narrow visual perspectives of conversations in theatre-based cinema with landscapes and natural light; dance movements also compensated for the lack of sound and dialogue in her films.12 Taking the model of chamber music, she advocated its lyrical qualities, its abstract forms, its economy rather than elaboration, but also its virtuosity, as an example for making what she called ‘chamber films’, which could engage with fundamental ideas and themes with a ‘pristine focus’.13 Deren wanted her films to be based on a cinematic approach to thinking and emotion, rather than on the film industry’s verbal and script based method: ‘the trouble with most films is that they are “written”, whereas cinematic thinking is another process altogether.’14 She remembers with delight the reaction of a thirteen-year-old who had watched Meshes of the Afternoon with his parents. They were surprised at the lack of sound in the film, but their son exclaimed: ‘oh, those things never happen with noise!’ The boy had appreciated

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the silence not as a lack of sound, but as something which actively contributed to the film’s powerful effect.15 Probably the most amusing story in Deren’s writings is her account of when she tried to get permission to film with a tripod in Central Park, Manhattan. The tripod made all the difference: between filming friends with a hand-held camera, and making a professional film. Deren found that the presence of the tripod implied a script, and therefore she had to answer questions about it: about the plot, the genre of the film, whether it would be a film made for entertainment or a documentary, and whether or not the actors would be wearing normal clothes.16 This experience made Deren realise that she had to find a way to describe what she was doing in the medium of film.17 She realised that movement, or energy was fundamental – for her it was stronger, more important, more powerful than either space or matter, as it creates matter. This realisation, which she describes as being ‘marvellous, like an illumination’, made her want to ‘celebrate that wonder, just by itself’.18 She explains that this is what she did in her film Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), where she filmed the African-American choreographer Talley Beatty, in between his teaching and dance class commitments, and his rehearsals for a Broadway production.19 She incorporated the very different locations in which she had filmed him, so that his steps and leaps became energy beyond normal spatial limits. She developed this concept further in her last film, The Very Eye of Night (1958), made with Antony Tudor’s Metropolitan Opera Ballet School students under his direction, and with music by Teiji Ito. As the film’s title implies, the dance we see takes place at night. The dancers, in ghostly negative, move through a space without shadows or horizons, and seemingly beyond gravitation. Deren filmed the whole dance using a hand-held camera, mostly shooting from a catwalk 25 feet above the dancers.20 Maya Deren called her films ‘choreographies for camera’, which she describes as being ‘dances choreographed for and performed by the camera and by human beings together’.21 In these films she had overcome the limitations of filmed dance, in which ‘dance retains its stage logics in film’ as well as the regressive form of film music which is ‘composed in concert terms’ and is not related to the other sounds in the film, but only functions as an accompaniment, as in music for a play.22

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Deren succeeded in transcending Hollywood’s ‘common denominator of perception’, by conceiving film ‘in terms of visual elements’ in the way that ‘a piece of music or a dance is composed of the elements of their respective forms’.23 She recommends to the ‘embryonic filmmaker’ the study of dance or music, as these arts exist through time, ‘since, after all, motion pictures are concerned with time and movement’.24 She also points out that the zoom lens works in time, that it ‘has the time dimension built in’ and consequently her concept of its use is choreographic: in film the zoom lens ‘should function boldly and dynamically as a presence’.25 Deren points out that cinema is ideally suited to a world of technological simultaneities, a world no longer based on a static image. As an example she mentions architecture, which now makes a dynamic use of steel and the structural principle of the cantilever, rather than just placing one mass on another. For Deren the art of cinema is not a ‘faster painting’ or a ‘more real play’; it’s a new medium with its own formal techniques and structural methods. Though machines are fundamental to this new art, Deren believes that the human body, mind, emotion and imagination are vital to cinema. She mentions how slow motion doesn’t work in an abstract film: a triangle or a square can move at different speeds, but it can never move in slow motion. To do that you need to film a living and moving body.26

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7 The Audiovisual Imagination Beyond The European Tradition Satyajit Ray Satyajit Ray was a Bengali Indian film director born in Kolkata in 1921. He was also a writer, illustrator and composer. Ray directed 37 films. After obtaining a degree in Economics, he attended VisvaBharati University, originally a college which was set up in 1863 by the poet, writer, composer and painter Rabindranath Tagore. As part of his studies Ray learned about Indian painting, and became particularly influenced by the artists Nandalal Bose, and Benode Behari Mukherjee. In his painting Mukherjee was influenced by both Cubistic space and the perspective techniques of Far Eastern art. After his studies, Satyajit Ray worked for an advertising agency, then as an illustrator for a publisher. One of the books he illustrated was an autobiographical coming-of-age novel, Pather Pancheli, about a boy called Apu, by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay. When the French film director Jean Renoir visited India, to shoot his film The River, Ray helped him to find the countryside locations he needed, and he also told him about his project to make a film of Pather Pancheli. Renoir encouraged Ray to realise his plan. In 1950, on a visit to London for his employer, the advertising agency, Ray took the opportunity to see as many films as possible. Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) made a big impression on him and this experience convinced Ray that he had to make films. 81

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In 1952, using his own savings, Ray assembled a mostly amateur cast and crew to shoot Pather Pancheli, which was made over a three-year period, whenever funding became available. Released in 1955, the film made him internationally famous, and he went on to make two other films which came to be known as the ‘Apu Trilogy’: Aparajito (1956), and Apur Sansar (1959). For his films Ray wrote the scripts, did the casting, directing and the montage. He selected the composers – for example Ravi Shankar for Pather Pancheli, and Ali Akbar Khan for Devi. Ray used his professional experience and talent as an illustrator to produce the publicity material for his films, and he used some of his own illustrations in Pather Pancheli.

Devi (1960) In this film, set in rural Bengal in 1860, Ray deals with the problems that arise when a wealthy landowner has a dream which convinces him that his daughter-in-law is an incarnation of Kali, the Hindu goddess. Her father-in-law installs her in his palace, and people come to her for cures and blessings. His son, who is a student in Kolkata, doesn’t at all share his father’s belief about his wife, and he attempts to rescue her. In a sequence in which they escape from the confines of her father-in-law’s palace, we witness the couple confronting their situation. As they walk through a marsh she notices the relic of a religious procession by the river: a sacred image which has been immersed in the water and now lies abandoned on the silt. She looks obsessively at this relic. The repetitive stridulation of the cicadas and the cries of birds in this sequence suggest the strength of her father-in-law’s mad obsession about her divine status. A repeated motif for the string section of a European type of orchestra externalises the feelings of her husband. He is a city person who does not believe in her divine incarnation, and he fears that he will lose her. The combination of the relentless sound of the cicadas and the music on European instruments reflects the conflict between ancient Indian religious tradition and more recent secular European influences. The music then takes on Indian melodic structures, though it has a European orchestral sound, evoking the hybrid nature of this fundamental conflict. 82

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natural sounds from the landscape itself spoken words, in the form of a voice-over, dialogue or both music other kinds of sounds not normally associated with the landscape shown – silence – a mixture of any of the above, as in the sequence from Devi described above. – – – –

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From 1961 Satyajit Ray composed his own music for his films, using both Indian and European compositional methods. The importance of landscape in this sequence from Devi brings up the general question of the function of landscape in cinema. Eisenstein believed that landscape is the aspect of film that has the least narrative burden. It is used for the expression of elements which lie beyond the plot: mood, moral and social dilemmas, anything to do with thinking and feeling which arises from the narrative, but is not necessarily expressed by just the plot. What, then, are our options when using sound with landscape in a film? We can make use of the following:

Kaneto Shindo Kaneto Shindo was a film director, author, screenwriter and producer, born in Hiroshima Prefecture in 1912. He served in the Japanese navy in World War II, and died in 2012 aged 100, after 78 years of working in the Japanese film industry. He was mentored by Kenji Mizoguchi, and directed his first film in 1951, thereafter directing another 45 films. These included a number of documentaries; one of these was Children of Hiroshima (1952), about school students who had been present when the atom bomb was dropped on their home town. Politically progressive throughout his long career, Shindo dealt with subjects such as poverty, life on the edge of survival, prostitution, petty criminality, strong women who fight gender prejudice, and explorations of human sexuality. It is surprising that given this kind of subject matter, Shindo’s films are not better known. However, some 83

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of his films have gained him recognition internationally. One of these is Naked Island (1960), which shows how a small family survives on an island which has no fresh water, so they have to row every day in a small boat to a nearby island to get it. Shindo wanted to make a film without dialogue, and this unusual aspect of Naked Island did not prevent the film from being awarded a prize at the Moscow Film Festival, and making enough profit to save Shindo’s film production company from bankruptcy. In an interview with actor and producer Benicio del Toro, Shindo confirmed that he had made this film as an experiment, to prove ‘that it’s the image that makes a film, not the dialogue’. Shindo affirms that though there’s no dialogue in his film, there is music composed by Hikaru Hayashi, and ‘the sound of humans, the sound of the wind, the sound of waves’. In Naked Island Shindo wanted to show the reality of work, ‘in the fields and in life’. It’s a film that exerts fascination as it is an extended image or metaphor. Another internationally recognised film by Shindo is Onibaba.

Onibaba (1964) In the introductory sequence, Shindo shows us two women killing two soldiers who were taking refuge from a battle. These women live in a marsh, and they survive by taking the armour from the soldiers they kill, and selling it. In Onibaba, Shindo shows a situation arising from a period of chaos and famine caused by samurai wars. Shindo insisted on having his film set in a susuki grass marsh: the sound of this kind of grass moving in the wind is a key feature. Hikaru Hayashi’s music for Onibaba features a taiko drum (a kind of drum with military associations, made known later by the Kodo Drummers ensemble) and a Noh theatre flute. There are also modern jazz influences, related to the American occupation of Japan after World War II. In Hayashi’s music there is a strong presence of noise. In Japanese music there’s a continuum from music to noise; noise and music have equal importance, more than in the Western European tradition. In the acting (there’s no dialogue at all for the first ten minutes in Onibaba) there’s a continuum from mime to dance to acting. The dominance of the marsh landscape in the film shows the influence of the pantheistic 84

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Akira Kurosawa The film director Akira Kurosawa was born in 1910 into a distinguished samurai family. As a boy he had lessons in samurai sword-fighting, and after leaving school he started to paint. His father, of samurai stock, was convinced that films were of value, and he frequently took his family to the cinema. Kurosawa described his situation as a young artist: ‘With my head crammed full of art, literature, theatre, music and film knowledge, I continued to wander, vainly looking for a place to make use of it.’ In 1935 he applied for an Assistant Director position at the newly established P.C.L. film studios in Tokyo. After a rigorous selection process, and some initial difficulties, in 1936 he started work as an Assistant Director for Kajiro Yamamoto, who became his mentor. Over a period of 57 years Kurosawa directed 30 films. In his Notes on Filmmaking, Kurosawa describes how he understands the role of a film director: ‘The role of director encompasses the coaching of the actors, the cinematography, the sound recording, the art direction, the music, the editing and the dubbing and soundmixing.’ He acknowledges that these roles can be considered to be ‘separate occupations’ but he does not regard them as such: ‘I see them all melting together under the heading of direction.’1 In terms of combining the visual with music and sound, Kurosawa initially worked in a conservative way: he simply had the music underpin what was happening in the visual track. But when he worked with the composer Fumio Hayasaka, from Drunken Angel (1948) onwards, Kurosawa worked audiovisually in a more Eisensteinian manner: ‘I began to think in terms of the counterpoint of sound and image as opposed to the union of sound and image.’ In practice this meant that he would use ‘light music for some key sad scenes’ and he would not put music ‘where most people do’. In this way he created the more complex emotional reactions that are characteristic of everyday life.2

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Shinto belief system, in which there exists a continuum of life in the form of spirits, which inhabit rocks, vegetation, animals and humans. The acting at times takes on the slow-moving or sudden violence of trance-like states.

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Kurosawa also sensed the similarity between musical structures and cinema. He believed that an effective structure for a screenplay ‘is that of a symphony, with its three or four movements and differing tempos’. Beyond the European tradition, he turned to the structure of the Noh play, in three parts: ‘jo (introduction), ha (destruction), and kyu (haste).’3

Throne of Blood (1957) Noh theatre, with its use of masks, mask-like faces, the Noh flute, often a slow trance-like pace, sudden explosive contrasts, is an evident influence on Akira Kurosawa’s samurai version of Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. When Eurocentric critics complained that Satyajit Ray’s films were slow, Kurosawa, a friend of Ray, defended this quality in the Bengali director’s work. Like Ray, Kurosawa had been inspired to make films by the example of Jean Renoir. John Ford was also a major influence: his masterly use of horses in his Westerns influenced Kurosawa, as well as his preference for shooting on location. In Throne of Blood the importance of location is clear – Kurosawa used the slopes of Mount Fuji as a setting, as he wanted its misty wastes to underline the bleakness of the subject of the film. In Throne of Blood mist is not only something which hides things, but also creates space, in the tradition of Chinese and Japanese landscape painting. In audiovisual terms, mist here corresponds to silence: mist defines space, as silence defines sound. In the music by Masaru Soto there’s a strongly repetitive characteristic, expressing the obsessive ambitions of the samurai General Washizu and his wife Asaji. These relentless repetitions (also present in the visual track in the film) increase tension, then they break down into powerful chance-dominated sounds: the sounds of birds, women weeping, arrows whistling. In an early scene, Washizu and his samurai warrior friend Miki are on horseback, lost in thick fog. They find themselves circling back to the same place, again and again, and we hear repetitive music, which does the same thing in sound. Here the repetitive motif for strings is similar in anxious mood to the music in the scene from Devi, mentioned above.

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Like Onibaba, Throne of Blood is influenced by Noh theatre. In the music there are the three different-sized drums from the Noh ensemble, gongs, wood blocks and the Noh flute. Also from the Noh theatre there are the explosive audiovisual contrasts, the dance-like (and sometimes trance-like) movements of the actors, dynamically punctuated by the music and percussive sounds. There is a spirit interacting with humans, as in Noh theatre, and there is even an actual scene from a Noh theatre play. When, at the end of the film, General Washizu, the Macbeth figure, sees for the first time the moving forest approaching his fort, we hear a gong sound which has not been used before in the film; this new sound externalises his extreme shock. It is an audiovisual technique I have seen used to great effect in a Kabuki play performed at the reopening of the Meijiza Theatre in Tokyo. At a point of emotional paroxysm, one of the characters moves in a sudden uncharacteristically violent way, revealing a vividly lime-green part of his costume, not seen before. This visual accent is matched simultaneously by a sound not heard before, from the instrumental ensemble on the stage. This noise element in Japanese music is also used to great effect when Asahi disappears into a pitch-black doorway, and the only sound we hear is the ominous susurration of her slippers. These films by Satyajit Ray, Kaneto Shindo, and Akira Kurosawa are examples of powerful audiovisual cinema, beyond the European tradition, and consequently at times are misunderstood by Western audiences and critics.

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8 Sonic Art, Digital Cinema – Chris H. Lynn: A Trilogy of Summer (2010–2012) An American filmmaker and sound artist, Chris Lynn became drawn to the wealth of ideas in Chinese culture through an anthology of Chinese literature. His first travels in China in 2008 proved to be a formative influence. Lynn listens to everyday sounds and uses them to discover how to present the visual elements in his films. This immediate audiovisual connection relates to how Chinese poets were often also painters – they were involved in a continual interaction between sound and the visual image. Lynn believes that ‘focussing on the mundane constantly provides unexpected sensations’, which is an idea related to James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, another key influence on Lynn’s work.1

Morning Fisherman (2012) Lynn shot this short film at Xuanwu Lake, Nanjing, very early on a summer morning. Morning Fisherman is one of eight short films which Lynn made as part of a Master’s research project, Reconstructing Scenic Views of Nanjing, in association with Professor Qin Fang, a specialist in Chinese history at McDaniel College, a liberal arts college in Maryland. The idea of the 89

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project was to reconstruct work by Literati artists, from 1600–1650, the late Ming and the early Qing period. The Literati were highly accomplished Chinese amateur painter-poets, usually with a background in the civil service, and a culture of collaboration and shared artistic appreciation with other Literati. They would devote their retirement to painting, poetry and music. The Literati from this period were concerned with themes related to personal expression, transcendence, immortality, and social questions: their ideas represented a mix of Zen Buddhism and Confucianism. In order to satisfy demand for their work, the Literati artists used woodblocks to make multiple copies of their work. Lynn makes a connection between the seventeenth-century medium of the woodblock and today’s digital video, as both are inexpensive, and copies are easily made and distributed. The Literati believed that fishermen, like artists, share an ability to be alone, to possess individuality, and to be above political greed and corruption. Morning Fisherman begins with a shot of a woodblock from a series titled Sixteen Views of Nanjing, by an anonymous artist. This picture is a lively representation using black ink on white paper, of three fishermen in two small boats, drawn from a high angle. The style is very much related to line drawing rather than washes of ink. This graphic quality is ideal for the dynamic lines of the waves whose rhythms dominate the picture, repetitions which are shared in the stylised drawings of the trees by the water. Next we see two fishermen standing in a small boat, more than three and a half centuries later. They look remarkably similar to those drawn by the Literati artist, but here they are suspended in all-enveloping mist. Their movements are confident and gentle, their reflections dissolve in the calm lake as their boat glides almost imperceptibly by (Fig. 2). Three more long takes follow, and we see – The corner of a traditional Chinese lakeside terrace, in the foreground hanging branches of weeping willow swaying in the breeze. Nobody is there; the further shore hangs in mist. – A fisherman sits by the lake. In silhouette against the mist, he tranquilly changes his bait. A mysterious small puff of smoke glides into shot from the left.

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– Another fisherman sits by the lake, fishing and smoking a cigarette. On the distant opposite shore, the lakeside trees form a horizontal grey mass; their reflection resembles a long Rorschach ink blot, its lower edge gently trembling on the water’s surface. A little puff of smoke peacefully ascends, dissolving in the dawn (Fig. 3).

SONIC ART, DIGITAL CINEMA – CHRIS H. LYNN: A TRILOGY OF SUMMER (2010–2012)

Figure 2. Morning fishermen.

The dissolution through the early morning mists in this film is combined with the sounds of a woman singing a traditional Chinese song on the radio, and sounds of sweeping – both sound sources are soft and attenuated like the visual images. The figures in Morning Fisherman share a quality that one experiences at a turn in an empty mountain path, when a man and a donkey appear, or someone herding cows, solitary activities repeated over thousands of years. http://vimeo.com/40814158

Afternoon Rain in Nanjing (2010) After spaces flattened by mist, the first section of Afternoon Rain in Nanjing is also spatially ambiguous and flattened, but in a very different way. 91

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Figure 3. Fishing, morning.

Filmed in a heavy rainstorm during the monsoon season, here we see part of a window of a coffee shop, but due to the reflections in the window it’s not always clear whether the people we see moving are inside or outside. Some cars and umbrellas of very different sizes move past; sheets of raindrops glisten on the window, reflecting the gold light from a display cabinet inside the shop, in contrast to the reflective silver of the door handles. Nearly everything we see is a fragment, including the grey designs on the window and the heavy rain: some running down the glass, some falling blown by the wind; and we hear distant thunder, traffic, light music and chattering in the coffee shop. There are two planes of rain sound: the heavy drops, and the generalised downpour – a sonic variation on the visual fragments, and the generalised theme of reflections. Suddenly the screen is filled with something large and bright blue – we don’t know what or where this object is, and it’s closer than anything else we’ve seen. It moves elegantly; someone invisible is closing it and shaking it gently: an umbrella. http://vimeo.com/39849525 92

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An umbrella also appears in the foreground in the first shot of this film, set in a park in Shanghai. Someone invisible is holding the umbrella as protection against the summer sun; they could be watching the lazy choreography of the large leaves of the lotus plants covering a pond, the undersides of their leaves an intense green. The panning shot rests briefly on a lotus flower, its multiples of pink tones contrasting with the earlier vivid green. The distant chatter of outdoor conversations is heard, combined with the stridulation of cicadas. People appear in the distance, on the far side of the pond. This sense of distance, a landscape with small figures, is part of the Chinese landscape painting tradition. It is a feature as common as Chinese landscapes with mist, as in Morning Fisherman, and these small figures are also part of a contemplative approach to nature. We see the water’s surface, mostly still, except for the little explosions of circles made by the darting of invisible pond skaters. Lynn concentrates on greenery reflected in the water, and suddenly throws focus, so that we see with great clarity the tiny vegetation laid out on the water’s surface. He also achieves this immediate contrast of scale audiovisually. He follows the gliding movements of a floating lotus petal, which resembles a tiny boat, and seems to have a life of its own, lightly touching another petal before moving on. Lynn combines this miniature choreography with the repeated plaintive sound of a train’s horn in the distance, evoking voyages on a much larger scale. In both People’s Park Reverie and Morning Fisherman Lynn interleaves his shots with fades to black. He explains that these sections in black provide pauses for the image that has just been seen, to ‘settle in the mind’. Also, the black sections are there ‘to control the pace of the film’. They have an effect on one’s breathing, slowing it down, so that your body becomes part of a more contemplative state of watching and listening.

SONIC ART, DIGITAL CINEMA – CHRIS H. LYNN: A TRILOGY OF SUMMER (2010–2012)

People’s Park Reverie (2012)

http://vimeo.com/46913557 http://www.framingsounds.com

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9 Two Films With Little Music Fritz Lang’s M (1931), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) Film music today and yesterday When talking about composing music for films, the composer John Williams explains that in the past, Hollywood films were generally shorter: a composer would only have to write around twenty minutes of music per film. For example, ‘a director like John Ford might not include music in, say, a battle scene, because he felt it would suspend realism’. However, nowadays, Williams points out, it would be unthinkable to have a battle scene involving Arnold Schwarzenegger without the accompaniment of a musical soundtrack. Music today can be included in nearly every scene in a film; in a Harry Potter film there can be as much as 120 minutes of music: ‘It’s like writing an opera,’ Williams concludes. For this reason he only composes music for at most three films a year.1 It is especially interesting to examine the audiovisual work of filmmakers who made films in the silent era, and then experienced the arrival of sound in cinema. These directors, for example Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford, had to decide how to use sound in their films when it first became available as a viable cinematic means of expression. Fritz Lang’s first sound film M dates from 1931, at the dawn of the sound film. He considered this film to be his favourite, as he was able to work without the usual film industry demands and restrictions: he was free to do what he wanted. Lang would tell the story of how 95

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Irving Thalberg, the famous Hollywood producer, would show films he liked to his writers and directors. On one occasion he showed them M. As usual after the screening he asked for comments, but nobody was particularly keen to be in any way negative about a film the boss obviously admired. However there was one person who broke the silence. He thanked Thalberg for showing them a very good film, but what would happen if anyone submitted a proposal to him for a film about a child murderer, and also without a love story? Thalberg thought for a moment, then answered that he would probably tell him to go away, in a manner of speaking. Given the apparently continuous use of musical accompaniment in films from the silent era, it seems strange that there is hardly any music in this film. Why? Let’s explore the film and see how he uses music in it, and, more particularly, sound.

How Fritz Lang uses sound and a little music in M Appropriately for a film about a child murderer, the film begins with a circle of children playing a typically cruel chanting game about a child murderer. So the film begins with sounds which come directly out of the action we are seeing. All the sound and music in M is of this type: an approach to the audiovisual based on the filmed documentary. Lang wanted his film to have a ‘newsreel’ quality, rather than featuring ‘artistic’ photography.2 M is also Lang’s first sound film, and the first action is heard: we hear the children’s voices in darkness before we see them, and the film ends with a mother’s voice heard in darkness. A conversation between two women happens across a straight cut. One woman is on a landing, and the other in her apartment. A shot from the landing, where we can look into the apartment, cuts to a reverse shot from the apartment to the landing – Lang gets us from one space into the other in a fluid way by keeping the women’s conversation going over the cut. As the woman in the apartment is doing the washing we hear a cuckoo clock – this provides a sound bridge across the cut to the cuckoo clock itself. It is difficult to imagine the newness of the sound film experience for the audiences of the time: not only are these films ‘talkies’ but the objects make sounds too. The striking cuckoo clock provides an audiovisual transition from a child’s world to the world 96

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– He uses it to make a transition from inside the building to the street outside, as midday strikes. – He combines the call of the cuckoo clock with a church bell sounding midday.

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of grown-ups, from the sound of the toy cuckoo to the chimes of the church bell and the sound of traffic, from domestic safety to the outside adult world in the big city. Lang also makes the sound of the cuckoo clock functional in two ways:

We see the parents waiting for their children outside the entrance of their school, to take them home to lunch. Lang makes use of the church bell sound (now sounding closer and louder) where before, in a silent film, an explanatory intertitle would have been used. The first appearance of the murderer is in the form of a shadow, against his very own ‘Wanted’ poster, and so when we hear him speak, his voice is in a disturbing disembodied form. The child, playful on her way home, is connected with this poster both visually and with sound: she repeatedly throws up her ball against the poster. In only a few seconds Lang compresses and communicates a lot of narrative information, just with images and a discreet use of sound. The murderer whistles a tune from Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King (from his incidental music to Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt), as he buys a balloon for the little girl from a blind balloon-seller. We don’t see the murderer’s face, which is hidden by his hat, and by the fact that this scene looks as if it’s been shot from a first-floor window, on the other side of the street. The balloon he buys looks like a grotesque caricature of a child. On the landing the mother calls down for her daughter, Elsie. There is a shot of the deep labyrinthine stairwell down which Elsie’s name eerily echoes. Lang has an eye for finding the photogenic in the dullest, most everyday surroundings. And he already knows how to use sound to create atmosphere. What he does here wouldn’t have been possible in the theatre – this echoing stairwell is an example of cinema being used as an audiovisual art form. The cuckoo clock is vital to our understanding of how time has moved on. 97

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The mother’s repeated calling of Elsie’s name resonates ominously through the empty spaces of the hour for lunch, heightened by Elsie’s vacant chair and empty bowl. Each time her mother calls her it’s never with quite the same inflection in her voice. Lang, influenced by Expressionism, uses shadow and light extremely effectively in these spaces.3 The laundry area has a particularly striking chiaroscuro. This lighting technique is continued throughout the film, giving it a characteristic visual style, later termed ‘film noir’. For the sound of a door closing, of an object being put down, Lang only uses touches of sound, just the essentials. He uses a great economy of means: he shows the murder of a child indirectly, in three shots: 1. Elsie’s vacant chair and empty bowl. 2. Elsie’s ball coming to a stop from outside the frame. 3. Elsie’s child-shaped balloon caught in telegraph wires, then blown away by the wind. Each of these shots of objects is seen in total silence, which emphasises Elsie’s absence, and the fact that we know that she is being killed as we watch these forlorn images. Lang was faced with a major problem: how could he literally show the sexually driven murder of Elsie? He points out that this is not only a problem which would raise issues related to censorship, but that, in rational terms, each person has a different level of reaction to a specific representation of something so horrific. By showing the murder using indirect images, Lang promotes a unique response in each individual in the audience: in this way he forces the audience to collaborate by using their individual imaginations in the creation of expression and emotion in his film. If he had shown the murder according to his own imagining of it, he would not have achieved the expressive power generated by these silent, indirect images.4 There’s a fade to black, then a sound fade-in to a newspaper vendor. His cry in the deserted street is heard before the fade-in is complete, and it becomes louder and louder as he approaches. Newspaper boys come running and shouting, until in the next shot the combined cries of the newspaper sellers are augmented by an excited animated crowd, again shot from above, and dominated by the loud voice of the first newspaper vendor.

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Next, also from above, we see the back of a man’s head. He is hunched over a letter he’s writing. The tune from Peer Gynt he whistles identifies him. It is combined briefly with the loud sound of the first newspaper vendor, rising up from the street outside, and quickly fading, as we are led into the intense concentration of the murderer who is writing to the press about his crimes, whistling the tune in a distorted rhythm. We don’t see his face until much later in the film. A crowd is struggling to read the latest news on a kiosk; somebody asks someone at the front to read aloud the news everyone wants to know. The sound of a man’s voice reading provides a transition to a shot inside, where we see the man reading the newspaper aloud at a table. We hear his reading voice ten seconds before the end of the shot outside, by the news kiosk. The smokers sitting round the table are caricatures straight from George Grosz’s satirical drawings.5 There is an argument and the sound of shouting leads across the straight cut to the sound of the angry voice of Elsie’s father in the apartment, addressing a policeman. Her mother weeps. This is another example of Lang using sound to bridge straight cuts from one location to another. The policeman’s voice carries over into the shot of a man reading a newspaper in the street, who is wrongly suspected of being the murderer when he answers a young girl who is asking him the time. The voice of someone who is calling for the police is used as a sound bridge to another citizen’s arrest of an innocent man: the public is becoming increasingly agitated and panicky. The noise of their shouting carries over into the next shot: a reproduction in the newspaper of the murderer’s letter, the one we saw him writing earlier. We read the text in total silence, and then a monocle appears. It’s passed over the paper, so we become aware that we are seeing it from the point of view of a man who is reading it. We then see that he is reading the letter into a telephone. The sound of his voice is used to make the transition from the shot of his view of the paper to our view of him reading it. This telephone conversation, between the government minister and the police chief, is used as a voice-over, accompanying shots of various police investigation techniques. We hear the voice of a handwriting expert, dictating his analysis of the murderer’s script to his secretary. His voice carries over into our first view of the murderer’s face, in his

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mirror, making strange grimaces into it, like a child. The graphologist’s conclusion that the child killer is mad is paralleled visually when the murderer opens his eyes wide in a disturbing stare into his mirror. These voice-overs unite the shots, as well as providing emotive expression: there’s no need for music. Today, ‘mood’ music would probably be used here, possibly in a montage sequence. Lang’s use of the telephone conversation between the minister and the chief of police as a voice-over is more sophisticated. This audiovisual technique enables him to show us concisely a whole range of simultaneous activity involving a variety of police search methods, through dialogue which appears incidentally explanatory, as we overhear the heated conversation between the two figures of authority. And at the same time Lang shows us the general frustration and incompetence of these authorities. The argument between the minister and the police chief is paralleled lower in the police hierarchy, at the level of a police inspector, in the argument between two witnesses about the colour of Elsie’s hat. (How do you tell red from green in a black and white film?) This method of showing dramatisations of current events is similar in concept to the ‘Living Newspaper’ theatre techniques developed in the 1920s by Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht, and by the early Soviet ‘agitprop’ theatre. Here Lang’s method is like a cinematic adaptation of the Living Newspaper technique. The police chief ’s voice carries over the straight cut into shots of a run-down part of the city at night, with prostitutes and their clients. Lit in a highly expressive chiaroscuro, with shadows, angles of buildings from a high angle view, this sequence evokes the sinister nocturnal world of George Grosz. The arrival of the police, in plain clothes and in uniform, takes place in silence – there’s an element of ambiguity here, as the plain clothes police do resemble crooks. The police raid on the nightclub dive is heralded by a whistle, immediately followed by a police whistle: these sounds underline the similarities between these two sectors of society in Lang’s film. The absolute silence of the nocturnal arrival of the police underlines the undercover nature of their operation, and makes the two loud whistles we suddenly hear a shock, also experienced by the clientele of the Little Crocodile nightclub.

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There’s a sound of general pandemonium, during which even the little hanging stuffed crocodile is disturbed. There follows a confrontation between the police and the nightclub crowd. Inspector Lohmann appears, leading to his name being repeatedly chanted by the crowd: this is how we are introduced to him. When Lohmann checks the papers of those found in the nightclub, he whistles a tune, like the murderer. Lang has already shown us how the line between police and crooks is thin: Lohmann winks knowingly at the crook whose papers are being checked, and who happens to resemble a younger version of the inspector. There is a hint here of a past collaboration between Lohmann and the young criminal with his forged identity papers. We see the police continuing their search and their arrests, while a small group of criminals gather round a table; one of them passes the time by examining his stash of stolen watches. The one they are waiting for is the last to arrive: their boss, ‘The Safe-Cracker’. The tense mannerisms of speech and gesture of this criminal leader, and his moral attitudes, also elaborated later, are Hitlerian. A flowing match cut initiates a sequence of parallel cutting between two smoke-filled meetings: the meeting of crooks at a round table, and a police meeting at a boardroom table. The amusing match cut is from a shot of the leader of the crooks, who makes a sweeping gesture with his arm, which is instantly continued in its arc by the arm of the chief of police. Towards the end of the meeting of the police, everyone is looking left at the police chief, who is invisible beyond the frame: only his voice is heard. Lang shows the criminals just as shadows on the wall in his last shot of their meeting, dominated by the shadow of their boss. This reminds us that our first sighting of the murderer was also in the form of a shadow, and this visual link underlines the underworld connection between them. The crime boss has a great idea: they should use the ‘Society of Beggars’ as spies to catch the serial killer; this turns out to be a successful tactic – the police have failed. In contrast to the two meetings, which Lang compared using parallel editing, he now uses a long and very involved travelling shot. He uses the camera to move through a caf´e where the city’s beggars congregate. Previously, the people in the meetings mostly sat still; their cigar, pipe

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and cigarette smoke provided the movement. Now the tobacco smoke in the caf´e, the beggars, and the camera are mobile. The travelling shot closely examines a variety of people at the tables, then the caf´e manager at his counter. As the camera glides past, we hear the related sounds: the sniffing then lighting of a cigar stub by a beggar arranging his collection of cigarette and cigar stubs (a comic parallel to the crook we saw earlier, arranging his collection of fine stolen watches), the voices of the sausage sharers, the sounds of the card players, of a man noisily gulping a drink, another man snoring. These sounds were added after the filming of the scene, as were all the sounds in M.6 The audiovisual result is remarkably effective in combining movement and sound – we feel as if we are moving through the caf´e, noticing all the various activities there. After we reach the caf´e manager, the camera goes through a window in the back wall of the caf´e. In this seamless transition to the big room behind the caf´e, we see there the crooks systematically organising the territories each beggar will be watching, using a variation of the city map technique the police used earlier. This scene is also parallel to the one in which the police were interviewing the crooks. Lang includes an odd detail: on a shelf in the back room we see the mounted skeleton of a heron, a counterpart to the stuffed crocodile hanging in the nightclub we saw earlier. In another part of the beggars’ ‘centre’, where their musical instruments for hire are stored, a man asks an organ grinder to test the instrument: we hear squeakings as the mechanical organ starts up. Then we see the blind beggar from the beginning of the film, the one from whom the murderer bought a balloon for Elsie. These squeaks disturb the beggar’s sensitive hearing, so he covers his ears with his hands. At the same time the organ music is cut off, so we are hearing with his ears. When the organ actually gets going, the blind beggar lifts his hands and he enjoys the music, and we hear it again too. Subjectivity is an important part of Lang’s use of sound. Sounds are not present in his film simply because we would expect to hear certain objects making them. As an example Lang describes our perception of sounds when we are alone in a caf´e, hearing everything that is happening around us, both inside and outside. However, if we are in the same caf´e actively listening to someone we have met, then this person’s voice dominates, and the other sounds disappear.7

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The organ music in the store provides the sound bridge to a shot of the organ being played in the street, taken from above: we see an audience of young children. Shots of the streets in the film are often from a high angle, as in the first shot in M – as if we are watching from the point of view of someone looking down into the street, like the murderer. Once the street organ piece is over, the only sounds we hear in the sequence which shows the beggars spying are the sounds of loud traffic. This is to prepare us for the blind beggar’s discovery. Lang shows us the irony of the blind beggar finding the murderer, while the police bungle their search of the killer’s apartment. We now see the murderer leaving his apartment block; the spaces portrayed in this sequence are strangely two-dimensional, like his obsessive behaviour. We see a world of reflections in shop windows, window displays – even the caf´e where he has cognacs looks flat. The intercutting of the policeman searching the killer’s room shows us a space which in contrast is far from flat. A strange arrow bobs up and down over the child who is targeted by the killer. When he fails to abduct the girl he obsessively whistles the tune from Peer Gynt, leading to his discovery by the blind beggar, and the subsequent chase, through the darkening silent streets, by the young man who is the blind beggar’s friend. The young man finds the murderer in a grocer, with a little girl, as he is buying fruit for her. The quiet distant roar of busy traffic is heard during this scene. Once they are outside in the street, the killer accepts an orange from the girl, taking an ominously gleaming flick-knife out of his pocket to peel the fruit. The young man who has been hiding, watching this scene, scratches the letter ‘M’ (for murderer) on his palm with white chalk, then walks up to the pair, pretends to slip on the orange peel, and at the same time imprints the ‘M’ on the back of the killer’s overcoat. As he walks off, the little girl picks up the knife and gives it to M, who is still disturbed by the words of the young man, who has just said that he should be arrested for causing dangerous litter on the street. Inspector Lohmann’s continuing search for M with the assistance of a detective is contrasted, through parallel editing, with the already successful hunt for the killer by the network of beggars who are now tailing him. The total silence and suspense of this undercover operation

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(a parallel with the earlier police operation, also at night) are punctuated and heightened by bursts of traffic noise. We then see M and the little girl looking through a toy shop window – our point of view is from inside the shop looking out, and the pair are shown in an uncanny visual counterpoint with the mechanised movements of a shadow puppet. The girl chooses a toy in the display, and as they are about to enter the shop she notices the chalked ‘M’ on his back – he checks this in a mirror by the entrance. As she attempts to rub the chalk off his coat, in the mirror M notices someone looking; he whirls round, a horrified look on his face, as the beggar disappears behind a truck. He tries to escape with the girl, but a loud whistle is heard – he lets her go and attempts to run away. Wherever he turns to escape prompts another whistle coming from that direction. He comes face to face with one beggar, and, panic-stricken, he almost tips his hat politely; then he makes a run for it. Then from a high angle we see M inexorably surrounded by his hunters in an empty street. But just as he manages to slip into a passageway under a building, a noisy fire engine roars past, concealing his escape. His pursuers look around them and conclude that he has hidden inside an office building; this office is seen through their eyes, by means of a panning shot, during which a church bell strikes six times. The working day is over and the underpass becomes full of the voices of the office workers as they leave for home, and M is not among them. The invasion of the empty office building by the crooks takes place at precisely 11 p.m. – we hear the church bell striking the hour. A whistled tune is used as a signal to the other crooks to invade the building. Other violence in this sequence is hidden: the night watchman is knocked on the head out of sight, and his uniform is taken. The torture of another night watchman takes place out of sight. The torturer (the crime boss) closes the door of his cubicle, and the assembled crooks crowd round the glazed door to see. Lang makes us into voyeurs: we want to see and hear what happens next, but we hear no voices. Then a scream tells us what has happened. The invisible torture is made worse by our imagination. Violence is again hidden when another night watchman is knocked unconscious, out of sight. We notice that the ‘M’ is still scrawled on the murderer’s back, as we see him trying to pick the lock of the attic in which he has

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been imprisoned. Earlier one of the night watchmen on his rounds had locked him in, concluding after a search that nobody was there. Lang parallels the crooks trying to get in, with M trying to get out: M uses his knife to unscrew and unpick locks, as the crooks try unsuccessfully to deactivate the alarms. The sound of M hammering a large nail to make it into a makeshift knife has given away his location to the crooks. Again M is betrayed by a sound that he makes. As a watchman pulls the alarm, the single ‘ding’ of a bell it activates at the police station immediately brings us there in the next shot. Back in the attic above the offices, we wait for what seems a long time in the dark with M, as we hear the crooks getting closer and closer. The suspense is heightened as the crooks’ search for M becomes accelerated: the police are on their way. One of the crooks is left behind as he’s stuck in a room with only the round hole in the ceiling he’s made earlier as a means of escape. He is captured by the police, who order him to raise his hands just when he is climbing up a rope out of the locked room with the safe in it. Lohmann investigates. Lang shows him as a cigar chain-smoking incompetent. One of the shots, from an extreme low angle, makes Lohmann look like a pig, as in a caricature by George Grosz. We see the police report on the break-in at the office building through Lohmann’s imagination. A set of stills represents his visualisations as he scans the police report, and his voice, mystified by what he reads, connects these images: the crooks have successfully gained access to the safe, but they haven’t stolen any money, and they have also broken into every part of the building. The only way the police can find out what lies behind this mystery is to interrogate the only crook they succeeded in arresting after the break-in. Lohmann threatens him with being an accessory to the supposed murder of one of the night watchmen, so he capitulates, and explains what his fellow criminals have planned to do with M in an abandoned distillery. We see the huge decrepit factory in a series of static shots, accompanied by the crook’s voice, explaining where M has been taken. Out of an almost black screen we hear M complaining vigorously. Then he appears, tied up in a sack, continuing to struggle and complain as he’s carried along like a parcel.

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Then we see the crowd of completely silent and still crooks, from M’s point of view: a very long panning shot, which ends with M crying out for help. The criminals in this shot are so immobile that it looks as if Lang used a still photograph here. We see the balloon-seller holding one of the grotesque child-type balloons. M looks up at it and mutters, ‘El . . . El . . . Elsie.’ This is a distant echo of her mother’s call at the beginning of the film. The climactic scene of the crooks’ kangaroo court involves the ‘defendant’ M, the leader of the criminals as the presiding judge, M’s ‘lawyer’, and some people from the underworld crowd. Lang included some actual criminals here, and his selection of faces brings to mind Eisenstein’s typage method, in which specific ‘types’ of people are chosen to reflect different aspects of society. This scene is full of silences punctuated by shouts – there is even some ironic laughter. Each of the murdered girls’ photographed portraits is shown to M. Peter Lorre portrays M as being evidently mad. His voice moves melodically from disturbed soft tones to an anguished paroxysm of loudness, a stylised screaming. This scene is almost musical in its alternations of solos with the crowd-chorus, and solo interjections from the mob. The crime boss demonstrates simplistic intolerance, emphasised by Hitlerian gestures and mode of speech. The sense that M is going to be lynched, in spite of his ‘defence lawyer’, is strong. The police arrive and everyone has to put up their hands: this group theatrical movement towards stasis, bringing to mind Max Reinhardt’s Expressionist choreographies of the crowd, brings this climactic scene to an end.8 The film concludes with a view of the judges’ empty seats in court. The judges and other court officials arrive. They sit down. The shot depicts them in a quiet orderly symmetrical arrangement, in contrast to the baying mob at the distillery. Also in a symmetrical arrangement, flanked by two other grieving mothers, we recognise Elsie’s distraught mother directly addressing us, the audience: she says that no justice can bring her daughter back to life. She urges all mothers to be vigilant and to watch over their children always. Her statement ends in darkness. The penultimate scene, in the makeshift court in the abandoned distillery, is in the Expressionist style. Peter Lorre’s extraordinary solo brings to mind such works as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912), Berg’s tragic victim Wozzeck in his opera of the same name (first performed

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in 1925), and the paroxysms found in the climactic solos in operas by Richard Strauss, as in Salome (1905). The scene is strongly musical: Lorre almost sings in Schoenberg’s sprechstimme (between speech and song) style. And his guilty eyes and squirming face are straight from Grosz’s depictions of serial murderers and other guilty figures in the urban night.

Alfred Hitchcock, Rope (1948) The film director Franc¸ois Truffaut once asked Hitchcock which of the arts a film should suggest: painting, literature or music. Hitchcock replied that the main aim in a film should be to arouse emotion in an audience, and that this happens through how a story is told, as well as how the film’s sequences are juxtaposed. However, he did admit that ‘At times I have the feeling I’m an orchestra conductor, a trumpet sound corresponding to a close shot and a distant shot suggesting an entire orchestra performing a muted accompaniment.’9 There is hardly any actual music in Rope, but at the same time it is a very musical film, probably because it arouses strong emotions in the audience. And emotions and music are very close, and can create synaesthetic sensations, as described by Hitchcock, when he feels like a conductor of an orchestra when directing a film.10 Eight of Hitchcock’s earlier films were drawn from plays, and so he wanted to try out something new in his film version of Rope, a play by Patrick Hamilton about two young men, Brandon and Phillip, who murder a fellow student as they believe that they can get away with it, and that this act is proof that they are superior to others. By 1948, when he directed Rope, Hitchcock had directed 38 films. The French film director Franc¸ois Truffaut described Hitchcock as an ‘all-round specialist’, which at first sounds like a contradiction. He clarifies this statement by explaining that Hitchcock masterminded the construction of every aspect of his films: the initial idea, the screenplay, the acting, the shooting, the editing, the sound track. And because of this mastery, Hitchcock was able to transcend the dichotomy between the experimental and the commercial in cinema.11 Rope is an excellent example of this combination of the experimental and the commercial. On the one hand, James Stewart, who played 107

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Rupert Cadell, Phillip and Brandon’s former teacher, was paid a commercial Hollywood film rate of $300,000 for his part in the film. On the other hand, Hitchcock attempted something which had never been tried before in cinema: he wanted to make it seem as if the entire film had been shot in one single take. Shooting a roll of 35 mm film takes a maximum of about ten minutes: this is therefore the longest take which was possible for a single shot at that time. As Rope is a play which takes place in real time, Hitchcock wondered whether it would be possible to shoot it ‘as one continuous action’. In practice this turned out to involve a staggering amount of planning in advance, as well as an unprecedented choreography involving not only the camera’s movements, but moving elements of the set, like walls, furniture, artificial clouds, even the lights. All these movements, and also the dialogues in the script, had to be meticulously rehearsed in advance, and it was only possible to shoot one reel per day.12 An idea of the complexities involved can be seen in a high angle photograph of the set for Rope, a small, cluttered and crowded space.13 As in a piece of music, every action depended on another action, and like an instrument or voice which makes too early or late an entrance, such an error in timing would spoil everything. Hitchcock explained how the very first take was ruined when towards the end of the shot the camera panned around and caught an electrician in the frame.14 As a play, Rope follows the three Unities recommended by Aristotle: of Time, Place and Action – the action develops in the same place within a continuous span of time, as in a piece of music. Because of the time limitations within each film reel, Hitchcock had to avoid the straight cut, mostly by filming into the back of a character, creating a sort of ‘fade to black’.15 This clever idea was feasible as Hitchcock wanted his camera to be in an eye-level position throughout Rope, ‘inside the action’.16 He takes away the audience’s point of view as it would exist in the theatre, where we watch what happens on the stage through an invisible fourth wall, by removing us from the audience and placing us directly in the middle of the action on the stage, as we glide amongst the characters like an invisible ghost. Hitchcock describes this method as being the

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most significant made possible through cinema, introduced by D.W. Griffith. To achieve this illusion of one continuous take in real time meant that each movement of the camera on the dolly had to be notated on the floor of the studio using tiny figures, the camera moving in response to cues in the dialogue. Hitchcock admitted that he was so nervous at first when shooting a take that he couldn’t even watch the action.17 But he knew exactly what should be happening at any point. Like a composer writing a score, he had meticulously worked out everything in advance. He had visualised the whole film: on the set he remembered the choice of lens and the framing for each shot, not bothering to look through the camera. Checking with the director of photography that the right lens was being used and that the framing was correct, after the take he would ask the camera operator if it had been a success, and, if so, he would approve the reel, and would hardly ever see the rushes at the end of a day’s shoot.18 In Rope Hitchcock used direct sound, so the live recording of the dialogues was another element that had to be correct in each of the long takes. At the start we witness the murder: the first human sound we hear is the dying cry of David Kentley as he is being strangled; then every word uttered is linked by the audience to the manner of his death. His corpse, hidden by Brandon and Phillip in a chest, in terms of dramatic irony and suspense is like a hidden bomb the audience knows will explode at some point, revealing to the world, which exists beyond Phillip and Brandon, what has happened.19 When Hitchcock abandoned the conventions of cinematic montage in Rope, he knew the importance of what he was leaving behind: ‘I was breaking with my own theories on the importance of cutting and montage for the visual narration of a story.’ Consequently he was also breaking with the earliest means of expression which created cinema: what he called the technique of ‘cinematographic rhythm through the use of montage’ developed by D.W. Griffith, based on the earliest examples of film editing by two of cinema’s pioneers, G.A. Smith (1864–1959) and Edwin S. Porter (1870–1941).20 Another fundamental editing technique, which he let go when using the idea of the illusion of a ‘single take’ in Rope, is the ‘shot/reverse shot’ method of filming dialogue. This represented another major

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change, as dialogue dominates this film, due to its origin as a play. The shot/reverse shot technique is an editing convention which bears no resemblance to the reality of experiencing a dialogue: one would have to dash from one point of view to another, to be behind one person, and then in the blink of an eye to be behind the other person, when witnessing the conversation between the two protagonists. However, Hitchcock’s ‘single take’ idea makes possible an experience which is closer to that of a theatre audience’s point of view: one can see the reactions of each person taking part in a conversation at any point, as the specifically chosen ‘reaction shot’ of the conventional shot/reverse shot editing technique is absent. Consequently many of the conversations in Rope are filmed as ‘two shots’ or ‘three shots’: two, three, or sometimes more people appear simultaneously within the frame. In fact, Hitchcock does break his ‘single take’ method, as there are some conventional straight cuts in Rope, for example at the very start of the film, when the camera pans from the scene in the sunny quiet street below, and pauses on a window with closed curtains. The introductory orchestral music comes to a stop on an unsettling slightly dissonant held chord, and then there is a brief silence. We hear a cry which bridges a straight cut through those closed curtains into the apartment, where we witness David Kentley being murdered. Later, another example of a straight cut appears as a reaction shot: as Brandon is recounting Phillip’s chicken-strangling activities, Phillip cries out, ‘It’s a lie!’ and there’s a cut directly to Rupert Cadell as we see him reacting to this statement. However, Hitchcock does point out that his use of a mobile camera and the movements of the actors follow closely his normal approach to editing: in Rope he was able to keep ‘the rule of varying the size of the image in relation to its emotional importance within a given episode’. So the ‘long shot–medium shot–close-up’ editing patterns remain, and they are brought about by the mobility of the actors and the camera. Another aspect of Hitchcock’s use of the ‘long take’ in Rope relates to what Eisenstein called ‘montage within the shot’, which is related to another technique derived from theatre: mise-en-sc`ene. The ‘long take’ method brings to our perception objects in the background of the shot.

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Examples of this ‘montage within the shot’ in Rope are the sophisticated modern paintings displayed on the walls of the apartment, extensions of the personalities of Brandon and Phillip, (Brandon describes one of these as being by ‘a new Young American Primitive’), the chest (which is like an ominously silent character), the dying sunset, and the changing cycle of coloured neon lights at the end of the film. Another characteristic of the long take is its ability to create suspense. It shares this quality with the pedal note, in this respect its sonic equivalent. The sense of suspense both in the long take and the held note derives from our question: when will it end? And what will happen after it ends? In Rope everything happens in real time, so these questions heighten our voyeurism. Hitchcock further heightens the suspense by encouraging us to be complicit in the continuing coverup game being played by the two murderers: ‘Oh no! They’re going to get caught now!’ is probably what we are thinking when Rupert eventually opens the chest and looks inside it. As the film progresses, it becomes clear from statements by Brandon and Phillip that they consider themselves to be generally superior to others: for an elite to which they believe they belong, even murder cannot be considered a crime. Hamilton’s play was written shortly after World War I, during which copies of Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra were distributed to the German troops. This book outlined Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘superman’ who considers himself to be beyond morality and superior to other men. When Hitchcock’s film adaptation of Rope was released in 1948, it had become clear that the Nazi movement had been partly inspired by the Nietzschean concept of the superman. In Hamilton’s play, Rupert Cadell is a veteran of World War I; he was wounded and walks with a stick. In Hitchcock’s Rope, Cadell is a veteran of World War II. In both the original play and in the film we learn that Phillip and Brandon were influenced by their former teacher’s ideas, attracted to his explanation of what we assume to be Nietzsche’s concept of the superman. These discussions at school would have taken place before Cadell’s war service, hence his horror and disgust at his former students’ literal application of ideas of superiority and amorality in their murder of their fellow student David Kentley.

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Brandon’s ‘ambience’ music Brandon has set up the whole situation in extraordinary detail – he’s the director of the action we are witnessing, and his attention to detailed planning brings to mind Hitchcock’s own approach to making films. Brandon has set up the meeting between Kenneth and Janet: a cynical attempt to get them together again. He engineers their interaction and adds music to accompany it: romantic Latin dance music from the radio. The whole film is based on dramatic irony. We know what is happening, and apart from the murderers, the other characters don’t know, except when everything is unravelled at the end.

The theme of obsession Obsession is by its nature repetitive, and obsessive repetitions pervade many aspects in Rope, expressing the obsessive ideas and behaviour of both Brandon and Phillip. In particular Brandon’s game of partial revelation and concealment prompts in Rupert Cadell a drive to investigate what has happened, and in the audience a horrified fascination with what is going on.

Obsession: rhythms of alternation After the murder, Brandon walks around holding the rope he and Phillip had just used to strangle David Kentley. When Phillip remonstrates with Brandon about this and urges him to hide the rope, Brandon goes to the kitchen and casually drops it into a kitchen drawer. Hitchcock films this in an interesting way: the kitchen door is in the background of the shot, Brandon walks towards it and pushes it open. The door swings shut, then, as it swings open again we get a brief view of Brandon dropping the rope into the drawer, before the door swings back. Hitchcock uses the swinging door to provide us with a shot of Brandon’s action, using the door to provide ‘cuts’ at the beginning and the end of this shot, otherwise not possible using his ‘long take’ method. Hitchcock uses the swinging kitchen door motif again, when the maid moves to and fro from the chest to the kitchen, when she clears the food from the top of the chest and replaces it with the books 112

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Brandon is giving away. Mrs Wilson has her own obsession about the correct way to do things, so her movements forwards and backwards from the chest to the kitchen and back underline her methodical way of doing things. In turn the kitchen door swings open and closed, like a vertical version of the horizontal lid of the chest, which we are anticipating that she will eventually open. Hitchcock films these patterns of alternation, as offscreen we hear the others discussing where David could be. Obsessive alternation appears again, in an audiovisual form, in the swinging of the metronome’s inverted pendulum, as Rupert makes it tick faster to raise the tension when he is interrogating Phillip about what has happened to David. Towards the end of Rope, we follow Rupert’s voice, which becomes a voice-over, as he tries to imagine how David might have been murdered, using the method of a detective who attempts to enter the mind of the criminal by mentally reconstructing the crime. Hitchcock is forcing us to imagine David’s murder, which we have already witnessed. The space we are being shown as the camera leads us through it is completely empty of human presence, so we are forced to imagine the violence which takes place there. Fritz Lang used a similar technique in M to make his audience imagine Elsie’s murder, by having shots also eerily empty of human presence. The imagined reconstruction of David’s murder becomes too much for Phillip, as he drunkenly calls out, ‘Cat and mouse! Cat and mouse! Who’s the cat and who’s the mouse?’, bringing back the obsessive alternations and repetitions which have been building the tension throughout the film. When Rupert further heightens this tension by taking the rope from his pocket, he holds it in both hands as if he is about to strangle someone, and he moves it up and down, as if he is waiting for the right moment to pounce on his victim. This repeated movement of the rope sets off the rhythm of the relentless red/white, green/white cycle of neon light alternations, which punctuate this final scene like a visual ostinato. Rope is Hitchcock’s first colour film, and his use of colour parallels his use of music: the obsessive repetitions in Poulenc’s piano piece, Mouvement Perpetuel No. 1, are related to the repeated cycles of the red, white and green neon lights at the climactic end of the film.

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Obsession: music and light Apart from Hitchcock’s use of typical Hollywood orchestral music as a framing device to begin and end the film, the music which appears several times in Rope is evocative of obsession: Francis Poulenc’s little piano piece Mouvement Perpetuel No. 1, which Phillip is practising in preparation for a recital which Brandon has organised. The nineteenthcentury style orchestral music at the start and end of the film is a variation on this piece by Poulenc, which is in the musical genre of the moto perpetuo. This genre is based on obsessive repetitions of melodic motifs or melodies, which are potentially repeated indefinitely. Poulenc’s piece appears three times in the film. On the first occasion Phillip plays it to calm his nerves after Mrs Atwater has told him his fortune: his hands will make him famous. He is instantly aware that her prediction would probably refer to his hands becoming famous for strangling David Kentley, rather than for playing the piano, as he has an ambition to become a concert pianist. Our focus is on his performance of the piece, so we don’t notice the entrance of Rupert Cadell, until he makes a comment on Phillip’s touch having improved, which is another dramatic irony in the circumstances. The concentration of the audience’s focus on Phillip, who plays the piano for the first time, in order to effect the surprise entrance of Cadell, is a theatrical technique, which works well here with Hitchcock’s wide shot and ‘long take’ method. Poulenc’s Mouvement Perpetuel No. 1 is an unsettling piece in the context of what happens in Rope. It starts with a simple downward modal scale which is then rapidly distorted; a sort of loss of innocence is implied in it. Later Phillip plays the same piece again to calm himself as Rupert starts to ask him more and more pressing questions about the strangeness of the evening, and the chicken-strangling episode. As Rupert interrogates Phillip, he lights the lamp on the piano, to shine it on Phillip’s face. Phillip objects to the light in his eyes, as it interferes with his playing. So, instead, Rupert picks up the metronome on the piano and plays with it. He uses it in counterpoint to Phillip’s playing, starting its ticking, stopping it, increasing the tempo of its pulse, and thus heightening the tension in his interrogation. This action parallels the way suspense is handled throughout the film: every time

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we appear to move away from the hidden presence of David’s corpse in the chest, something returns to remind us of it, thereby increasing the suspense. The twin notions of repetition and obsession are key structural elements in the film: the peaks and troughs of the waves of suspense eventually build into a single large wave which breaks at the end of the film. Hitchcock has quiet street sounds which occasionally appear during the action. These sounds are deliberately placed to indicate the distant presence of the everyday, which sometimes intrudes into the oppressively sealed atmosphere of the apartment. A particularly subtle touch is the brief soft sound of a distant police siren; its repeated wailing interacts with Phillip’s playing of Poulenc’s piece: this is a foreshadowing of what happens after the climax of the film. In addition, Hitchcock provides an audiovisual counterpoint to these sonic repetitions, in the form of a light repeatedly going on and off in the dusk in the city beyond the apartment window. This light is placed centrally in the space between Phillip and Rupert. Other distant city lights going on and off as night approaches continue to emphasise the obsessive repetitions in Rope. The third and final time Phillip plays the piece by Poulenc occurs at the end of the film, after Rupert has opened the apartment window and fired three shots into the night, releasing the sounds of the wider everyday world into the oppressively closed space. Voices from the street below can be heard – someone asks to use the telephone to call the police. Then from far away comes the sound of an approaching police siren. Phillip’s playing is now very nervous and tentative: it is clear that he and Brandon can do nothing but wait for their arrest. The repeated glissandos of the police siren become louder and distort beyond recognition the pitches of the Poulenc piece. This everyday sound breaks up the obsessive, almost airtight world of Phillip and Brandon. At this point there are no more words, just a combination of the repetitions in the Poulenc piece, the wailing siren and the cycle of the neon light. Here, at the end of the film, Hitchcock uses the interaction between music and sound like a composer, climactically. These sounds release the tension which he has built up relentlessly from David’s dying cry at the beginning of the film. Hitchcock used the musical terms crescendo and coda to describe how he handled the climax at the end of Rope.21

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Naturalism in Rope Apart from the orchestral music, the elements of music, sound and light in Rope emerge directly from the situation which is presented; there’s a naturalism in Hitchcock’s approach, which also determined his choice to attempt a sense of continuous action through the illusion of a film which has been shot in a single take. However, Hitchcock underlines the obsessive nature of the story by using repetition musically, in the form of sound and light effects. As there is so little music in Rope, speech itself takes on the expressive characteristics of music in the film – for example, audiovisual duets and trios, conversations which are shown involving two or three people interacting in the same shot. Towards the end, Rupert Cadell’s impassioned speech to Brandon about murder is comparable to the desperate speech by the child murderer at the end of M: both speeches share an expressive power which is musical in character. Hitchcock described how he obtained the sounds he needed for the final section of Rope. He insisted that the sounds should be realistic, so he had a microphone placed six storeys above the street, from which were recorded the voices reacting to the gunshots. And he refused the offer of a recording of a police siren from the sound effects library, the volume of which would simply have been gradually turned up to give the impression of the police approaching the apartment. Instead he arranged for an ambulance with a siren, which was sent two miles away, and it was recorded approaching the film studio’s gate. Hitchcock worked in Germany early in his career in the 1920s, including at UFA, Germany’s largest film studio. He admired F.W. Murnau’s films from this period, and Fritz Lang’s Der M¨ude Tod (Destiny) made a special impression on him.22 Afterwards, when he began to make crime films in England, he was called ‘the English Fritz Lang’. And when Lang later made crime films in Hollywood, he was called ‘the German Alfred Hitchcock’.23 A concern in both film directors with the realistic detail, their ability to induce the collaboration of their audiences’ imaginations, their sensitivity to the audiovisual, and their freedom to experiment, are good places to begin an enlightening comparison of their work.

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10 The Audiovisual in Three Found Footage Films Dziga Vertov, Three Songs of Lenin (1934) In Leningrad I remember an elderly lady telling me about the day Stalin died: everyone was so shocked – it was like losing a god. On that day she was crossing one of the endless bridges over the frozen River Neva. Suddenly she heard what seemed to be guns firing nearby: it was the gun-like cracking of the river beginning to thaw. For her this was Nature’s homage to the passing of Stalin. This sense of collective awe and loss on a huge scale is what Dziga Vertov aimed to express in the section on Lenin’s funeral in his found footage film Three Songs of Lenin, the loss of ‘Lenin the giant and the beloved Ilyich, close friend and great leader’ who had died on 21 January 1924.1 I wonder whether the old lady had unconsciously remembered this film, with the climactic moment where guns are fired in vast snow-covered squares, in homage to the passing of Lenin. This section from Three Songs of Lenin particularly stands out in its effective use of music, sound and image. In his first sound film Symphony of the Donbass (Enthusiasm) released in 1931, it was Vertov’s intention to not ‘limit ourselves to the simplest concurrence of image with sound’ but to follow ‘the line of maximum resistance – under existing conditions – that of complex interaction of sound with image’.2 In the section from Three Songs of Lenin where Vertov portrays Lenin’s state funeral, at the end of the second Song, he 117

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succeeds in his aim, creating an example of audiovisual montage which is effective even today. From the very beginning of Three Songs of Lenin there is a virtually uninterrupted interaction of music with image. Before the funeral section there is only one single use of ambient, naturalistic sound, when an instructor is speaking to a girl. We see Lenin making speeches, but we do not hear his voice, as music is heard instead. So it comes as a surprise when we see Lenin making a speech and we actually hear him speak for the first time in the film. This is dramatically effective, as well as adding a note of pathos, as the next time we see him he is dead. His name in huge letters on the screen prompts the start of Wagner’s music for Siegfried’s funeral in his opera Twilight of the Gods, from his The Ring of the Nibelungs cycle of four operas. This is the music that accompanies the images of Lenin’s state funeral. This powerful piece of music, dominated by the low strings and a large orchestral brass section, with its funereal trombone chorales punctuated by staccato rhythms on the timpani, which are then expanded into sharp brass accents, has an immensely slow pace. It makes the other appropriated funeral music in the film, Chopin’s Marche fun`ebre (played by a military band), seem comfortably small in comparison. Wagner’s music for Siegfried’s funeral is ideally suited to Vertov’s purpose: its climactic cycles of repetition express for us the immense significance of Lenin to his people, and the awesome fact of his death and its implications for the vast country he had led. The editing of the funeral footage has Lenin’s corpse as its fixed centre. The masses who file past his body have a speeded-up quality, in direct contrast to the ponderously slow pace of the music. Vertov alternates shots of groups moving from left to right, and right to left, with figures standing still. But he always returns to Lenin’s body, the still centre lying at the heart of the frenetic preoccupation of the masses. Included amongst the masses we see representatives of Soviet society: peasants, sailors, soldiers, factory workers, the intelligentsia (we recognise Maxim Gorky), party leaders including Stalin and Trotsky, children. In addition a wide variety of ethnicities are shown: Oriental, Trans-Caucasian, also Russians from the far North, and Western Russians. We have the impression that all Russia is attending this funeral. Images of large chandeliers provide the transition from inside to outside, to the funeral parades in the streets.

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A close-up of a woman’s face signals a change. A quiet chord in the Siegfried funeral music is matched harmonically with the distinctive chime of a large Russian church bell. We return to the close-up of the woman’s grieving face, and three more chimes are heard against total silence. Vertov has used Wagner’s music to build up tension, counterpointing its slow pace with the faster pace of his editing. The chiming of the bells is at the peak of this build-up of tension, which is released by a soldier who signals the order to fire. Mass ceremonial cannon shots are alternated with mass rifle shots, sixteen in all. Vertov has rhythmically orchestrated these into four groups, the last cannon shots coming from ships, and the final one being extended by a double echo. Each shot is accompanied by a change of image, usually a still of a crowd, or the cannon or rifles being fired. The gunshots have the effect of stopping all movement: the crowds are frozen into stills after their frenetic motion; even a train is freeze-framed, in a striking shot from below. Machines, masses and individuals – all stop. The firing of the first ship’s cannon projects the image into the desert. We see an image of part of a troika on the frozen steppe, recalling Gogol’s image in his novel Dead Souls, of the troika which flies across the vastness of Russia. Isolated figures in the deserts of Soviet Central Asia move to a stop. After a close-up on the face of an elderly lady, a ‘babushka’ stereotype, the echoes of the last shot rumble over the frozen wastes of a Russian winter landscape. In complete contrast to the isolated sounds of the ceremonial shots, Vertov orchestrates the final release of tension in this section with a montage of what sounds like a combination of dozens of ships’ horns and factory sirens. This montage gives us the impression that this sound is likewise being heard all over the Soviet Union. Twenty-five images accompany this release: images of sandy deserts and frozen steppes, stills of parades, factory machinery, and images of individuals in the crowds or in the desert. The continuous drones of the horns and sirens are in complete contrast to the short sounds of the cannon we have just heard. Now the images become short, punctuating the long notes of the horns and sirens montage. In this section of Three Songs of Lenin, Vertov has achieved a total integration between visual image, music and sound. In his progression from music to sound, he uses sound in a musical way. Wagner’s music for Siegfried’s funeral moves seamlessly into the tolling bell, which is

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matched by the sharp bursts of cannon and rifles. The long tones of the horns and sirens montage provide a final release of tension. The visual images move from indoors, where Lenin’s body is on display, to outside on the crowded streets, then to the big empty spaces where the cannon are fired, to the empty wildernesses of all Russia. This section expresses the major turning point in history that Lenin’s death represented, together with the vast scale of the Soviet empire. It was also to be a turning point in Vertov’s own life as a filmmaker. The Three Songs of Lenin was his last film before his increasing isolation as an artist under the Stalinist regime.3 He would no longer have the freedom to make such a dynamic and daring audiovisual montage.

Bruce Conner, Crossroads (1976) In 1975, as an undergraduate music student, I remember a composer friend titling a recently composed string quartet ‘Disarm! ’. With the ending of the Vietnam War in 1975, the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union once again came to general public attention and preoccupied many politically aware students. With his short film Report (1963–67), the American artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner showed himself to be an artist with political and social concerns, so a film like Crossroads in 1976 does not come as a surprise. Like Report, its structure is based on the repetition of found footage of a historic event, in this case the nuclear test on Bikini Atoll in 1946. In Report Conner repeats the Super 8 film taken by Abraham Zapruder of the Kennedy car, just prior to the president’s assassination, and varies the repetition by selecting different start and end points in this short piece of found footage. By the rhythmic nature of his editing, and by playing on the fact that we all know what happened next, he creates tension. In Crossroads, repetition functions in a completely different way. Conner uses the interaction of music with found footage to create an apocalyptic evocation of the power of what at first seems to be multiple nuclear explosions. To achieve this he uses footage from Operation Crossroads, from the National Archives in Washington DC. This is official footage: a variety of views of the nuclear test explosion studied from different levels and proximities – from the ground, the ocean, and aircraft flying at various altitudes. The shots 120

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are long, and so they invite meditation, and the three-dimensional changes to the rooted mushroom cloud must have appealed to Conner the sculptor. Crossroads is a film which has a sculptural quality: we watch the explosion from different angles and find ourselves studying it as one would a sculpture. The film is divided into two parts, both of which begin with the image of cross hairs from an imaginary gunsight. This image also relates symbolically to the film’s title. In the first part we see nine views of the explosion, and in the second there are six. However, one element of the film is key in creating a different atmosphere for each of the two sections: the use of sound and music. The sound for the first part is a montage of engine noise from different aircraft, punctuated by silences and the roar of the explosions themselves. The noise of the blast is not always synchronised with the explosion. A sense of the large scale is added when the noise of the blast arrives some time after we have seen the explosion. Many would not consider the montage of these naturalistic sounds to be music at all. Interestingly, the credits refer to music by Patrick Gleeson, the analogue synthesiser composer. In order to understand how such manipulations of sound can be considered to be music, an examination of the context of their assemblage may be helpful. In the late 1930s, John Cage ‘was drawn to Var`ese’s ideas on the “emancipation of sound”’.4 Later, in his influential book Silence (published in 1961), Cage wrote that the composer Edgard Var`ese had ‘fathered forth noise into twentieth century music’.5 Var`ese had previously defined music as ‘organised sound’.6 The American composer La Monte Young came across Cage’s ideas when he attended Stockhausen’s composition classes in Darmstadt in 1959.7 From an early age La Monte Young had been ‘fascinated by continuous environmental sounds, such as the hum of motors, power plants, refrigerators’.8 These dual preoccupations, a fascination with emancipated sound and the acoustic characteristics of machine-derived drones, led La Monte Young to produce pieces both composed and improvised, using extremely long, sometimes endless, drone-like sounds. His Composition 1960 No. 7 is simply the notation of a perfect 5th, the B below middle C, played together with the F sharp above it, with the instruction ‘to be held for a long time’. It is in the context of these experiments that Gleeson’s montage of aircraft engine drones can be understood as

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music. His structured use of found sounds matches Conner’s structured use of found footage from which these sounds were obtained. The second part of Crossroads has an altogether different character because of the music which accompanies it. Terry Riley’s structured and improvised music completely transforms the way we see the footage of the nuclear test. Riley was part of The Theatre of Eternal Music, an ensemble formed by La Monte Young in 1962, and which also included the filmmaker Tony Conrad.9 Like La Monte Young, Riley was preoccupied with music of great, almost endless duration. Both composers are influenced by Indian culture and are influenced in their music by the practice of meditation. They were both students of the Indian musician Pandit Pran Nath.10 However, they are musically very different: what La Monte Young achieved with drones, Riley achieved with the repetition of identical melodic fragments. In his Keyboard Studies No. 2 (1964), Riley simply notates his melodic motifs, using an infinity symbol to indicate that they are to be repeated indefinitely. There is no need for him to notate dynamic (loud and soft) variation, as the musicians are permitted to vary the melodic patterns during the performance of the piece, and to play when they wish, a form of structured improvisation. His Keyboard Studies No. 7 (1967) is notated with circular staves, so the infinity symbol is no longer needed. To emphasise that his music has no beginning and no end, Riley puts the treble clef, which identifies all the notes, in the space at the centre of the circular staves. This notation looks strikingly like a mandala, a meditation wheel which derives its name from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘a circle’. The seemingly endlessly cyclical nature of Riley’s music forms a very appropriate accompaniment to the cycles of explosion Conner has made from his found footage. The transition from Gleeson’s naturalistic drones and sounds of explosions from the first half of Crossroads to Riley’s rapidly repeated motifs on electric organs pushes Conner’s already meditative film to a deeper level of meditation. The absence of naturalistic sound and the combination of just moving image and music places our audiovisual senses on a different level of receptivity. This is heightened by the structure of the work, where Riley’s cycles of fast repetitions are embedded in the slow visual repetitions of the explosion shot from aircraft flying round the test site. In combination

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these create a mandala of interweaving cycles, with Riley’s hypnotic music continuing into the darkness after the end of Conner’s film. Vertov’s use of just image and music, which we examined earlier, has the opposite combination: rapidly moving images of found footage, cyclically edited so that they keep returning to Lenin’s corpse, together with Wagner’s awe-inspiring and very slow cyclically structured music, which produces a similarly hypnotic effect. In these films both Vertov and Conner share a concern with an event of major historical significance. However prosaic their found footage may have been, they have in both instances transformed it by using an ingenious interaction of music, sound and image to convey the extraordinary events they are portraying.

Jack Chambers, The Hart of London (1968–70) When I saw this film I was struck by three things: – its poetic ‘stream of consciousness’ quality – Chambers’ use of sound and its interaction with the images – the red curtain of blood from a dying lamb at the beginning of the second part, which comes as a vivid contrast to the extended use of shades of white in the first part of the film. (The lamb lies on an altar-like slab of stone in an abattoir. Chambers lingers so long on the periodic convulsions of the dying animal that it seems that this shot is looped. Unfortunately it probably isn’t.) The Hart of London, Chambers’ last film, is more intimate, it does not deal with generally and universally known content, as Vertov does in Three Songs of Lenin, or Conner in Crossroads. The ‘London’ in the title is Chambers’ home town, London, Ontario, on the River Thames: In the London area there are no commercial galleries aside from a couple of jewellery stores that sell pot boilers . . . London’s ‘official’ art circles, such as they are, are completely smothered by out-of-date sophistication. No person or group seems to realize that this city is not a cultural centre – it is a backwater. I and several others . . . believe that this is a good thing. Due to the mass media most people’s eyes and ears are on radio, TV and newspapers, and never or rarely on

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where they are. Because of this we can work without being bothered. Our way of working . . . [is] to cover what so many painters, writers, and photographers have used – their own immediate environment – something we don’t do in Canada very much. This accounts for the interest in local primitive artists, the art of children, graffiti, old photographs from the district, local architecture, et cetera.11

This description of London in 1962 was part of a request for a grant to the Canada Council. It was written by Greg Curnoe, a fellow painter in the group of London artists to which Jack Chambers belonged. In spite of its isolation, London had a lively contemporary arts scene in the 1960s, centred on the University of Western Ontario. There was even a London Filmmakers’ Cooperative, founded by Chambers in 1968.12 Previously, as a young man, Chambers had escaped from London and travelled in Mexico for six months. Four years later, in 1953, aged 22, he escaped from London again. He later explained that he had left Canada because it was ‘utilitarian, puritanical, indifferent to anything that was not a “safe job” and a “proper living”’.13 He sailed to Europe, where he travelled through Italy, Austria and France, before settling in Spain for several years. Learning that his mother was dying of cancer, he returned to his home town in 1961.14 So why did Chambers make The Hart of London? The answer lies in a particularly striking account he gives of the osmosis which occurs between the individual and the surrounding landscape: The Castilian landscape was always impenetrable for me. It was something I desired to become by entering it but never could or never did. The landscape was always a beautiful mystery: human odour seemed to reside in it so that a vista of several miles in that clear and machineless light seemed a particle of torso under a microscope. The hills were rubbed bare by wool and hands had touched every inch of them. There was an organism within an organism that appeared as landscape. But I knew I was not inside. Returning to Canada over a couple of years the seasons uncovered images of myself still gesturing in the invisible. A few visual appearances possessed a fundamental legibility. There appeared memories of some incidents that had a dimension beyond the incidents

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Perhaps it is this combination of Proustian memory mixed with Joycean epiphany that prompted Stan Brakhage, when introducing this film to an audience, to mention that the painter-filmmaker had made a very personal film with considerable use of found footage: I was close to him, and involved in getting his work over into the United States . . . He is dead now, after ten years of slowly dying of cancer, across which time he made the film we’re going to see . . . Jack Chambers’ footage was footage that was taken for entirely other purposes. It’s what’s in himself that he has put vibrantly into this footage. This makes the end of this film one of the most vibrant and terrifying paradigms of our passage through life that I’ve ever seen . . . The first hour of the film is one long emotional similarity of section, that trembles toward a giant splice. This splice happens in the second hour of the film, which is a kind of montage of huge sequences of cuts. This is distinct from Eisenstein’s sense of montage, where, at every cut, there is a reverberation which makes the combination of the two shots noticeable. Here you notice much more than just ‘A plus B’. In this film there’s one giant conjunction that reverberates back across the whole earlier section of the film and, more than any film would do, really creates a reverberation across the second half of the film. And they’re absolutely dependent on each other.16

THE AUDIOVISUAL IN THREE FOUND FOOTAGE FILMS

themselves. Such incidents (diving from a train-bridge into the Thames) divided into vortex and periphery, the periphery or accompanying memories being absorbed into the centre of the essential gesture. This synthesis, invisible in time, was an experience of reality, a revelation, an experience of an organism within an organism that had accepted me as its centre. This was the basis of my decision to stay in Canada.15

It is worth noting that Brakhage thinks of the film as being two hours long, when its running time is actually about 80 minutes. Its wealth of images, and the use of superimposition, negative images and solarisation have a tendency to create a sometimes confusing meditative space with its own flows of time. This ‘interior monologue’ aspect of the film brings to mind the flow of interweaving images and occasionally stark imagery that Joyce uses in his novel Ulysses, for example in the ‘Proteus’ episode. 125

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Whereas Joyce in exile recreated the heart of Dublin with the help of maps, documents and his memories, Chambers portrayed his town from its heart – he worked from the centre and moved outwards: Much of the footage is old newsreel film from the archives . . . in London . . . One rapid-fire, almost indecipherable section in the first reel is simply scores of common snapshots that Chambers had solicited through an ad in the London Free Press.17

After a lyrical start to the film, where we see almost archetypal images of a hart leaping in snow, we experience a confusion of images appearing and disappearing in winter whiteness. As a painter, Chambers had moved from a hyper-realist style to experimenting with aluminium paint, to create what he called ‘instant movies’, silver paintings which have a temporal dimension. This experience not only moved him towards film, but also towards a certain way of perceiving images in time, whether in painting or in film: I observed that silver gives a positive-to-negative image reversal depending on the source of the light or where you view it from. As you move, the positive forms become negative and vice versa coming back . . . space has become time.18

Chambers’ view of the role of the flow of often confused images in the first part of The Hart of London is also revealing. He explains the way in which the long confusions are eventually released into recognisable images: In a way there’s almost two kinds of consciousness, isn’t there? . . . When the images start to congeal, like pulling the cart, then you’re prepared for something. You’re prepared to really see things. And all that latticework in the front was a preparation to do that, to make the eye think, For God’s sake let me look at something. And then you give them something to look at. And that’s when you have the best opportunity of really penetrating because the eye will open for you, of course the eye of the mind . . . .19

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The passage from confusion to the readily recognisable image is paralleled in Chambers’ use of sound. The first sound one notices is an ambiguous one. It has been variously described as the noise of distant shelling, the crash of breaking waves, or the sound of the wind. Because of the wintry and bleached imagery of the first part of the film, I associated this recurring sound with the noise of a sled sliding on snow. In fact the very ambiguity of the sound is what matters. When, midway into the film we notice that the ambiguous repeated sound becomes the sound of running water, we are already looking at images that are mostly readily identifiable. When the running water sound disappears at last, the film has moved into another dimension: one hears a woman’s voice whispering repeated instructions to two children feeding a deer. The sound has changed from being mysteriously unrecognisable during the confused first half of the film, to familiar everyday sounds, like a bird squawking, and the sound of traffic, to finally becoming speech, something we understand symbolically in a completely different way. The key characteristic of Chambers’ use of sound lies in the way he articulates sound and silence by repetition. He chooses a sound that is varied and lasts for a few seconds, like an average cinematic shot. Then he has several seconds of silence before the same ‘sound shot’ returns. In each of the two sections of the film, the duration of the silence between the recurring sound is always the same, as is the duration of the sound itself. However, the sound and silence ‘block’ for the first half has a different pattern of durations to the second half’s ‘block’ of running water and silence. These sound/silence patterns are like slow ostinati, and they have a similar function to an ostinato in a piece of music: it unifies a work where considerable variation is taking place. In The Hart of London the identical repetitions of the sounds hold together an extremely varied and complex flow of images. The other characteristic of the ostinato is that the extensive variation which is happening around it has the effect of making the fixed nature of the ostinato seem to change: it not only binds things together, but is changed by the things it binds. In the film the complexity of the ostinato sound itself, as well as the way it is combined freely with a continually changing set of images, means that we don’t necessarily notice that the sound is on a loop. The way we perceive the sound is affected by the images we see.

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Chambers’ use of a sound loop is related to the use of tape loops by Terry Riley, and other composers who create meditative states with identical repetitions of sounds. The slow loop of the first, ambiguous sound creates a trance-like calm amidst the visual ambiguities of the first half of the film. As soon as the sound of the loop becomes recognisable as water flowing, the found footage of a difficult birth, and the film of the dying lamb precipitate a different association. The sound of water is coloured by the blood we see in the images. This is part of the recurrence of water and other liquid imagery that appears throughout the film, and is another instance of the poetic interweaving of sound and imagery in The Hart of London.

The audiovisual transformation of found footage I have selected these three found footage films because the filmmakers have succeeded in making me forget that some or all of their film material has not been shot by them. In all cases the filmmakers have used the interaction of music, sound and film in a highly individual and personal way. Before working in film, Vertov experimented with recorded sound.20 This experience and sensibilisation to sound later enabled him to achieve complete audiovisual expression when sound film became technologically feasible. The way he uses Wagner’s music (in the section on Lenin’s death in his Three Songs of Lenin) makes me forget its original association with the death of Siegfried. Wagner’s music, as well as the innovative music Vertov has created with a montage of noise, have become indissolubly connected to a depiction of Lenin’s funeral and the consequences of his death. In Bruce Conner’s Crossroads, the atomic explosions become a type of kinetic sculpture, and the sound composed for the first half of the film relates to them in this way. In the second half, Terry Riley’s music, a sort of aural mandala, heightens our perception of these alarming images of nuclear annihilation, bringing to mind Oppenheimer’s quote from the Bhagavad-Gita, after the first nuclear explosion: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ In The Hart of London, Chambers’ deeply personal attachment to his city and the nature of its Canadian isolation in wilderness has prompted a structured use of sound that is also deeply personal. It too transforms 128

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found images, creating the artist’s (and consequently our own) vision of his city. In his text Without Words, Vertov describes Three Songs of Lenin as ‘an interior monologue proceeding from the old to the new, from the past to the present’.21 One could say that any found footage film proceeds ‘from the old to the new, from the past to the present’. But I have not seen many examples of this type of film, where the prosaic and naturalistic character of the original documentary footage has been transformed so effectively by the use of audiovisual montage, so as to create a powerful and highly individual means of expression.

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11 Two Audiovisual Collages: Pasolini and Paradjanov Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) The Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, born in Bologna in 1922, was a poet and a writer. When his films were released he would publish his texts relating to the film in the form of a book, for example: Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962), Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (1964), Edipo Re (1967) and Teorema (1968). His activities as a poet, writer and filmmaker were completely intertwined: he always perceived that his filmmaking and his writing were ‘analogous experiences’.1 In his early poetry, Pasolini was inspired by the Friuli region where he lived as a young man. During World War II, his younger brother Guido was a member of the anti-fascist partisans and was killed during rivalry between partisan groups of varying affiliations.2 In 1943 Pasolini was called up. His entire regiment was captured by Nazi troops, but he and a friend managed to escape and hide in a ditch, during a burst of machine-gun fire.3 In 1949, Pasolini was involved in a scandal involving a mix of sex and politics, the local Catholic church and the Communist Party. Accused in an anonymous letter of disappearing into bushes with three teenage boys during a local festival, he was convicted of ‘obscene acts’. Eventually after an appeals procedure he was declared innocent, due to insufficient evidence. This scandal cost him his membership of the 131

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Communist Party, and, unable to continue working locally, Pasolini and his mother moved to Rome.4 His poetry reflected this change to a gritty urban environment, featuring others who, like himself, had migrated from the countryside to major cities to find work. At the end of his poem The Holiday Over . . . , he evokes night falling in Rome: a song coming from somewhere can be heard over the wet and dirty pavements. Bright car headlights pass along the river, there are clouds with one or two stars, and in the distance the sounds of the voices of workers and machinery can be heard. Work is starting again after the holiday, but these sounds are just a stale, brittle and fragile covering ‘over the naked universe’.5 Pasolini’s sensibilities are strongly audiovisual: music and sound are of equal importance to the visual in his means of expression. Pasolini saw in cinema an opportunity to have his work and his thinking disseminated internationally: ‘In his posthumously published text, Who I Am, Pasolini gives his reasons for deciding to work in the medium of film: he wants to go beyond the limits of his Italian nationality and to extend the range of his thought by using a new means of expression, one which doesn’t just use words.’6 His early poems set in Friuli were written in the Friulian dialect, and poetry, especially in dialect, can be difficult to translate. Cinema is much more international as an audiovisual means of expression. Pasolini recalls how his days making his first film Accattone (1961) were the best in his life, he was ‘carried away by the virginity of his enthusiasm’.7 The film director Bernardo Bertolucci remembers how ‘Watching Pier Paolo shoot Accattone I felt as if I were present at the invention of cinema.’8 The director Federico Fellini was the producer for Accattone, but he pulled out after seeing the first two sequences filmed by Pasolini – for Fellini they were too amateurish, and too Neorealist (by then a style considered to be old-fashioned). But in Accattone, Pasolini added to his Neorealist aesthetic (the influence of the work of directors like Rossellini and de Sica) his own approach to cinema, including the use of extracts from music by composers in the classical European musical tradition, such as J.S. Bach (Accattone) and Antonio Vivaldi (Mamma Roma). In The Gospel According to Matthew, Pasolini expands his range of music, so that from the European tradition he makes use of pieces not only by J.S. Bach and Mozart, but also the twentieth-century

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composers Prokofiev and Webern. In addition he uses music from the Russian Orthodox choral tradition, and from African and AfricanAmerican musical traditions: The Missa Luba, a Congolese mass, and Motherless Child, a spiritual. This audiovisual technique was intended to stimulate powerful emotions in the audience, which partly result from the distance between what is being shown and the music he uses, a form of audiovisual counterpoint. The way in which music and sound are used in a film is the key to that film’s underlying ideology and expressive power. The audiovisual technique which is used in the film often appears at the very beginning – in the case of The Gospel According to Matthew, the opening credits are combined with the Gloria from the Missa Luba, which is followed very closely by the final chorus from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Only a quick fade separates the two very different styles of music – the audiovisual collage idea is already there in the opening credits, and Pasolini continues to use this method throughout his film. Pasolini chose the text of Matthew’s Gospel because of its ‘stylistic accelerations’, ‘the abolition of chronological time, the elliptical jumps within the story’.9 These qualities result in juxtapositions and lack of transitions in the montage of his visual sequences, which in turn provoke a collage of music and sound. So the text and discontinuous style of Matthew’s Gospel produces a film which is like an audiovisual collage. Pasolini combines the choral music in the style of the Russian Orthodox tradition with the scene showing the Deposition, the Lamentation and the Entombment of Christ. In this highly compressed chronology, in the next scene the tombstone miraculously falls back in front of the mother of Christ, Mary Magdalene and others: the Russian Orthodox choral music is immediately replaced by the triumphant and ecstatic Gloria from the Missa Luba. In the earlier scene when Christ descends to the seashore in search of disciples, the same piece of choral music in the Russian Orthodox style is used. This is a choral tradition which is characterised by an exceptional clarity of pitch and harmonic textures, and consequently a clarity of emotional expression. At the beginning of this scene there is a panoramic establishing shot of parched rolling hills. As the camera moves slowly from right to

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left, we hear a choir singing a single held note. It’s like a horizon in sound, and this music is the only human presence in an empty landscape that extends as far as we can see. As the camera moves, the single note begins to be integrated with the vast emptiness of the scene, and at the end of the panoramic shot the music begins to absorb the rolling shapes of the hills. Christ suddenly appears from this arid environment, walking fast, continuing the movement from right to left in the following shots, until he reaches the sea. At this point the choral music reaches a climax as the fishermen are laying out their nets, and there’s a leap to the opposite direction, as two young fishermen, caught in close-ups in a blur of speed, run ecstatically from left to right, carrying their nets. Christ calls for the fishermen to join him, to leave their work and become ‘fishers of men’. With the ecstatic nature of the choral music Pasolini uses in this scene, he has a choreography of movement which involves both the landscape and people within the shots, from right to left, left to right, towards and away from the camera, and he zooms into the faces of the two older fishermen. This choreography is heightened by the absence of any sound other than the music, other than initially brief splashes of the nets being laid in the water. As the scene ends we hear the quiet sounds of small waves breaking on the beach, sounds which return us to the world of the everyday. Pasolini remembers how Roberto Longhi, formerly his Art History professor at the University of Bologna, particularly liked this scene. He felt that Pasolini had shown Christ ‘going out into the country with the impetus and the sense of a future full of things to do, just like a nineteenth-century Impressionist would have gone out to paint in the open air’.10 The Gospel According to Matthew came about as a result of Pope John XXIII’s call to Italian artists to engage with Christianity in their work. This call, which may have seemed anachronistic in the early 1960s, was part of an old established church tradition of commissioning artists to create sculptures, paintings and murals for cathedrals, churches and other religious buildings, and commissioning composers to write music for church services. It might seem strange for an unbeliever like Pasolini to respond positively to such a call, but when Oswald Stack questioned him about this, Pasolini replied that it was because of his ‘tendency always to see

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something sacred and mythic and epic in everything, even the most humdrum, simple and banal objects and events’.11 Even before visiting Palestine for locations, Pasolini had decided to set his film in the impoverished and rugged landscapes of the Italian South, as he knew that he wanted to work by analogy: ‘I did a long tour of the South alone by car and chose all the locations [ . . . ] Bethlehem was a village in Apulia called Barile’ and the castles in the film were Norman castles in Apulia and Lucania. He also selected locations in Calabria, for the scene where Christ walks with his apostles, and a slope on Mount Etna was used for the Temptation of Christ by the Devil.12 These landscapes in the film are associated with strong emotions, and so they prompted the use of music. For the scene on Etna, Pasolini combines the landscape with Anton von Webern’s crystalline orchestration of J.S. Bach’s Ricercare. When the Roman soldiers, following Herod’s order, gather and then descend from the hills into a village to massacre the children, Pasolini uses Prokofiev’s ominous music from the start of his Cantata, drawn from his score for Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky. The ascent to Golgotha is combined with Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music – the curved backs of the people in the procession up the hill are echoed in the wind-curved grass which leans in the same direction. Mozart’s music is not directly linked to either the people or the grass, and for this reason it brings these two very different elements together. Eisenstein explains how this audiovisual phenomenon works: as human beings we are part of the landscape, and both our existence and the existence of the landscape are manifestations of matter. Both are subject to the laws of being, and so take part in ‘a continuous process of becoming’. Our awareness of this ‘continuous process of becoming’ can only be subjective, and so artists have to use the recreative process of analogy, in order to create a distance from what we are experiencing, so that we can realise what is happening, and at the same time emotionally participate in the event being shown. This point of high tension between our objective observation and our subjective response is what Eisenstein calls ‘nonindifferent nature’, and landscape, which is both the context and the reason for what we are at the same time witnessing and experiencing, is consequently emotional and therefore ‘invariably musical’.13

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Pasolini chose to work mostly with non-actors, and, in The Gospel According to Matthew, with local people from the places in which he was filming. He explains that he is not interested in actors, except when he uses an actor to play an actor, and he tells how for The Gospel he ‘went round and chose all the extras myself, one by one from among the peasants and people in the villages round where we were shooting’.14 This approach provides the immediate and already existing contact between people and their land and environment. However, he also chose some friends, whom he mixed with local people, for Christ’s disciples and the Pharisees. At first he had the idea that Christ should be played by a poet or a writer, and he thought of Yevgeni Yevtushenko, or Jack Kerouac, even Allen Ginsberg.15 However, when a Spanish student who had read his work went to see him, Pasolini immediately realised that he had found his Christ, though the young man was initially reluctant to take up his proposal. Pasolini felt that Enrique Irazoqui’s face resembled some paintings of Christ by Georges Rouault, and this appealed to his analogical approach in The Gospel According to Matthew. There were several advantages to Pasolini’s method of using nonactors. Like Eisenstein, when he used what he called ‘typage’, Pasolini could choose faces that he felt represented various characters: the varied personalities and ages of Christ’s disciples, of the powerful men amongst the Pharisees. These faces represent the social and political context through which the story of Christ develops, and they are needed in order for the film to be clear and comprehensible to a wide range of people. Another advantage was that there were none of the associations which attach themselves to celebrity actors, associations which exist entirely outside the world of the particular film in which they are acting, and so can be a distraction from the film’s own atmosphere and purpose. Pasolini had no problem with transferring to the cinema his role as an established poet and writer: ‘I’ve always thought of a film as the work of an author, not only the script and the direction, but the choice of sets and locations, even the clothes, I choose everything – not to mention the music.’ Pasolini’s approach to making films allows him to make full use of the expressive possibilities of audiovisual cinema: ‘ – the cinema is not image, it is an audiovisual technique in which the word and the sound have the same importance as the image.’16

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The journalist Gid´eon Bachmann noted that Pasolini, when filming The Arabian Nights in Yemen, would organise everything. He used only two 35 mm cameras without sound, one of which would be reloaded as he was filming with the other camera. His camera operator would pass him the required lens, and his director of photography would measure the light. Pasolini would, at the last moment, place his actors with minimal instructions, and shoot a higher than normal number of takes per day. Bachmann notes that two elements were outstanding: the landscapes and the costumes. The costumes were made in collaboration with Danilo Donati, Pasolini making all final decisions. Some sounds were recorded on location, to be added in post-production, along with the music.17 This method of working is not only like that of an author, but also like the artists who in the past had made murals and sculptures commissioned by the Catholic Church, a creative approach which relied of necessity on assistants to bring into being the artist’s vision. The music in The Gospel According to Matthew, in particular from Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and his Mass in B Minor, were realised through skilled instrumentalists and singers, who performed the composer’s score in all its detail. Working within a different musical tradition, Father Guido Haazen collaborated with his choir to create a synthesis between Congolese music and the text of the Mass, which resulted in the Missa Luba. A significant part of what Pasolini called ‘the reverential style’ in The Gospel According to Matthew is the influence of artists in the ways in which he articulates the appearance, the postures, facial expressions, even glances of his non-actors. This aspect of Pasolini’s work represents the influence on him of Roberto Longhi’s cinematic art history classes at the University of Bologna, during which Longhi would analyse paintings by using slides to show and compare details in work by various artists, akin to a montage of close-ups. For The Gospel Pasolini mentions Duccio and Mantegna as well as Byzantine painting. He mentions the influence of Piero della Francesca for the costumes for the Pharisees – these aspects were part of the ‘numerous different sources’ which went into the stylistic mix in his film: ‘And that goes for the music as well: the music in The Gospel is a mixture of different styles and techniques.’18 Another influence in this mix of styles and techniques is that of Carl Theodor Dreyer, specifically his depiction of Joan of Arc’s trial

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and execution, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927–1928), a silent film in which Dreyer used the actual transcript of what was said at the trial in 1431. For his first film Accattone, Pasolini asked his cameraman Tonino Delli Colli to watch this film, as a way of communicating to him the type of filming he had in mind.19 Later he said that The Passion of Joan of Arc had been ‘one of my cinematographic and visual models’. It was for him a ‘norm of absolute simplicity of expression’ which had given him ‘the sense of the close-up, the sense of figurative severity’.20 Dreyer’s film is notable for showing the developments in Joan’s trial through a series of close-ups of the faces of the protagonists: Joan, who appears to be in various stages of trance, and the parade of scornful and severe faces of the judge, lawyers, priests and soldiers, a continuously changing landscape of faces which provides a counterpoint to what was said at the trial. A similar use of such close-ups complements Pasolini’s representation of landscape, for example when he shows us a sequence of close-ups of the faces of Christ’s disciples as they eat olives, and Christ has to justify their eating on the Sabbath to a group of Pharisees who have followed them. This is one of several ‘landscape of faces’ sequences Pasolini uses in The Gospel, and some of these are combined with music, as is also the case when later Christ encounters some children at Capernaum. The music of Bach’s introduction to his aria Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott (Have Pity on Me, My Lord) from the St Matthew Passion is used in both of these cases. Christ’s face in close-up is as much a dominant feature in The Gospel as are the close-ups of Joan in The Passion of Joan of Arc. As well as the music, the driving power of Christ’s words propels the film onwards, and this virtuoso performance was made possible by dubbing: the voice of Christ, spoken and declaimed by the actor Enrico Maria Salerno, was added in post-production. Pasolini stated that he was ‘against filming in sync’. He felt that while dubbing alters a character, it ‘also makes it more mysterious; it enlarges and enriches it [ . . . ] it raises a character out of the zone of naturalism.’ Then Pasolini explains the very important difference between a realist approach to cinema, and one which is naturalistic: ‘I believe deeply in reality, in realism, but I can’t stand naturalism.’ For Pasolini ‘dubbing’ is closer to a form of audiovisual collage – it’s an opportunity to use this technique as an expressive

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means: ‘What I often do is to “cross” two non-professionals. I believe in polyvalence in a character. I like elaborating a character.’ So dubbing in this context is not a form of audiovisual sticking-plaster to cover an inadequate voice, but it is a key part of Pasolini’s thinking about the nature of cinema: ‘The main point is that my love for reality is philosophical and reverential, but it is not naturalistic.’21 Pasolini’s film of Christ’s life is also a collage of ideas: a juxtaposition of the everyday (using cin´ema verit´e techniques, including zooms and the hand-held camera) with representations of the miraculous. He told the French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris (where The Gospel received its premiere) that he wanted to show Christ from the point of view of an everyday ‘Italian man of the people’. In The Gospel According to Matthew Pasolini makes extensive use of the long take. Philosophically Pasolini stated that ‘reality seen and heard as it happens is always in the present tense’. For this reason, he explains that the long take is the ‘primordial element of cinema’ and consequently it is ‘in the present tense’. He was aiming to have the audience feel as if they were actually there when Christ was performing his miracles, being tempted by Satan, being betrayed, and being crucified. He wanted to provoke in the audience a highly subjective, participatory response through creating an audiovisual reality (a ‘reality seen and heard’) ‘in the present tense’. For Pasolini ‘subjectivity is thus the maximum conceivable boundary of any audiovisual technique’.22 The role of the artist’s subjectivity as being fundamental to the formal aspect of audiovisual technique was earlier referred to by Eisenstein, who stated that ‘the audiovisual image is the extreme limit of selfrevelation outside the basic motivating themes and ideas of creative work’. If Eisenstein’s term ‘self-revelation’ is replaced by Pasolini’s ‘subjectivity’, then clearly these two statements about the audiovisual are quite similar. What is also clear is the need for the artist to make the necessary audiovisual choices. We have seen how Pasolini insisted on complete control over every aspect of the film: the selection of locations, casting, costume design, text, the use of silent cameras, music, sound, audiovisual montage. For his actors he used non-actors, and non-actor friends, even his own mother as the older Virgin Mary. This could be considered an unusual approach, unless one considers the practice

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of fifteenth-century Italian artists, who incorporated their patrons and others in their depictions of religious events. At the same time as featuring everyday realities, such as actual towns from the Italian South, and actual local people, and his familiars, Pasolini wanted to include this very sense of the everyday in order to be able to ‘re-consecrate things as much as possible’. His aim was to ‘remythicize’ his subject matter. He did not want to ‘reconstruct the life of Christ as it really was’. He stated that he wanted to present Christ’s story ‘plus two thousand years of Christian translation’ as the two millennia of Christian history had already ‘mythicized’ his biography.23 Pasolini’s ambition is in itself a recipe for a formal nightmare, a possible decline into the hopelessly complex, excessively allusive and ultimately unintelligible. So how does Pasolini avoid this disaster? He is telling a story that is already known, and his fragments of music are repeated in different audiovisual contexts, which provide added layers of meaning, and at the same time some structural stability. For example, we see Judas Iscariot during a pause in Christ’s teaching, paying for some olives that the disciples eat. Pasolini combines this scene with the introduction to the Erbarme Dich aria from Bach’s St Matthew Passion. This music is heard again when, in the dark of the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ tells Peter that he shall betray him three times. The music by Bach from the St Matthew Passion itself appears at this same point in Matthew’s account of Christ’s story: so Pasolini in The Gospel associates it with the theme of Christ’s forthcoming betrayal, by both Judas and Peter. Pasolini was very much aware of the formal problem with regard to a work with such diverse influences, in terms of visual, musical and sonic elements. He believed that his film had clearly ‘a stylistic unity’, but that this unity was ‘not to be found in any one single formula’. He believed that The Gospel ‘is a mixture of various formulae’ and that its ‘unity comes from a mixture of styles’.24 This explanation still does not answer the question as to how Pasolini controlled the variety of different styles he is using in this work. He explained what he felt was at the origin of the stylistic mix at the heart of The Gospel According to Matthew: ‘I, a non-believer was telling the story through the eyes of a believer. This mixture at the narrative level produced a mixture stylistically.’25

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His statement provides a reason why the stylistic mixture he is using is present, but not how the work has the expressive power it has. It’s only when Pasolini lists the variety of ‘material borrowed’ in his films in general that he provides us with an idea of how he achieves successful audiovisual expression in his work. He explains that his cinema is ‘composed of elements, material borrowed from different cultural sectors: borrowings from dialects, popular verses, popular or classical music, references to pictorial art and architecture.’ He makes it clear that he does not ‘claim to create and impose a style’. And he explains what happens: ‘What creates the stylistic magma with me is a kind of fervour, a passion which impels me to seize any material, any form which seems to me necessary to the economy of a film.’26 The evident mixture of influences has to be driven by emotion, subjectivity, and inevitably self-revelation: ‘What counts is the depth of feeling, the passion I put into things.’27 Pasolini’s choice of faces of a tremendous variety and type, parched landscapes that feature towns and castles which resemble torn architectural collages; this mix, this ‘magma’, had to have some kind of formal unity to hold all of these disparate elements together. And Pasolini’s choice of technique – the ‘long take’, his use of the hand-held camera, the silent camera, the telephoto lens, zooms, and available light; his fidelity to Matthew’s text with its occasional obscurities – are all brought together by music and sound – but are not in themselves complete pieces, but fragments, an audiovisual realisation of the fragmentary nature of Matthew’s original Gospel. This fragmentary quality produces the dynamism and therefore the powerful emotions which drive the film forwards, a film structured like an audiovisual collage, with scenes which glide vision-like one into the other. Pasolini tears up the fixed and literal connections between the audio and the visual elements, so that they can be combined in new ways, creating new ideas through analogy: the method of the poet. Pasolini compared this effect to the temporal separation between lightning and thunder – he underlined its unique audiovisual quality, a delay between the visual and the sound which at times could appear to be extraordinary: ‘thus it is that cinema is truly audiovisual.’28

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A selection of Pasolini’s comments I hate naturalness: I reconstruct everything29 . . . the duration of an image is of fundamental importance – if I see something for half a minute it has one value, if I see it for three minutes it has another.30 Just the idea of making something traditional gives me nausea, literally, in the physical sense of the term.31 The style in The Gospel is very varied: it combines the reverential with almost documentary moments, an almost classic severity with moments that are almost Godardian – for example the two trials of Christ shot like cin´ema verit´e.32 – the figure of Christ should finally assume the violence inhering in any rebellion which radically contradicts the appearance and shape that life assumes for modern man: a grey orgy of cynicism, irony, brutality, compromise and conformism . . . of hatred for anything that is different.33 . . . Once life is finished it acquires a sense; up to that point it has not got a sense; its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.34 . . . the overall design of a work is always different from its details. And these only become so many tiny micro-organisms faithfully reproducing the general structure of the work, when it is complete.35

Paradjanov and his time My first arrival in Soviet Moscow has left an indelible impression. It was night, the low wattage lights at Sheremetyevo Airport, the long wait at customs and passport control took place in a dim depressing environment. At last, at the Intourist desk, all our travel plans were cancelled automatically, so that every part of our future journey in the USSR became known to the authorities: at all times we would be accompanied by an officially approved person. At the hotel there was a noticeable lack of welcome – at first we were ignored totally: we were invisible at the check-in desk. Then we felt our way through the poorly lit corridors to our rooms – even the dejournaya was invisible, the lady on each floor of Soviet 142

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hotels who monitored the entrances and exits of the guests. We had to bribe our way to a table in the big empty restaurant on the ground floor. We shared our identical meal with a few other disconsolate travellers. One of these was a COMECON salesman, who travelled around Soviet-bloc countries selling vacuum cleaners. After talking for a while, he leaned confidentially towards us and said, ‘Wait until dinner is over – I’ll take you to something special.’ After the other guests had disappeared, the salesman opened an anonymous door nearby. We were greeted by an explosion of colour: Georgian traditional dance music played by musicians in Georgian costume, lots of Georgian champagne, Russian caviar and other delicacies spread out in abundance on banqueting tables. A dance was in full swing, a celebration of Georgia’s 1,100th anniversary. A pair of small Georgian men in costume took away my assistant for a dance, arm in arm on either side of her; a pair of large Georgian women in full costume took me away to dance, in a variation on this joyful symmetry. That is Paradjanov: a whirl of colours and music exploding amidst the drab bureaucratic conformities of the Soviet state. Sergei Paradjanov was born into an Armenian family in Tbilisi, in 1924. During World War II he studied the violin and singing at the Tbilisi Conservatoire, and also studied painting, theatre and ballet. This combination of a training in music, art, theatre and dance was ideal for a future film director. His drama teacher suggested that he study at the VGIK (the Moscow Film School), which he did from 1946 to 1952. During the summer of 1947 in Tbilisi, Paradjanov became involved in a group who associated with a certain ‘Major Mikava’. According to Paradjanov they were all arrested, and he and others were imprisoned for suspected homosexual activities. He was released in early 1948: this was to be the first of three periods of imprisonment for Paradjanov. In 1951 he married Nigyar Serayeva, a Tartar student. Shortly after the wedding she was murdered by members of her own family. After graduating from VGIK, Paradjanov left Moscow to work as a film director in Kiev at the Dovzhenko Film Studios. In 1955 in Moscow he met a young Ukrainian, Svetlana Scherbatyuk, who was born in Canada into a diplomatic family; they married and had a son, Suren.36

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At first Paradjanov’s films reflected the official Soviet ‘socialist realist’ aesthetic. But in 1964 he made his first internationally successful film, a work which was the result of his own personal artistic decisions: his own vision, independent of the State and its elaborate and byzantine machinery of ideological controls. This film, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, was shot in a village in the East Carpathian mountains, and its actors spoke in the Hutsul dialect. Paradjanov worked closely with local people in filming this love story between rival families, a Ukrainian variant on the tale of Romeo and Juliet. His aim was to realise a work in which ritual elements, music, dance, and all objects featured in the story would work together in terms of colour. In Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors Paradjanov followed the example of painters who use colour not only for atmosphere but also as thematic content. He recommended that film directors follow the approach to colour found in the paintings of Breughel, Arkhipov, Nesterov, and artists both modern and from the more distant past. Paradjanov worked with a local Carpathian painter, Fedor Manailo, who was very helpful regarding traditional Hutsul art, and information about their songs and rites.37 Paradjanov developed his unique approach to filmmaking with Sayat Nova, about the eighteenth-century Armenian poet-musician, or achik. The achiks perform at local weddings, festivals, pilgrimages and funerals. They play a key role, maintaining an oral tradition of history and values through poetry, storytelling and music, travelling in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey and Iran. Sayat Nova was made in 1968 with the Yerevan Film Studios, and was banned by the Soviet film authorities. Cut and re-edited by the film director Sergei Yutkevich, it was re-released as The Colour of Pomegranates in 1969.38 In 1973, after years of official interventions and the banning of his various film projects, Paradjanov was arrested on a mixture of charges, including art trafficking, currency speculation, and homosexuality. He was sentenced to five years in hard labour camps, shocked to find himself amongst murderers, and those convicted of the most extreme crimes involving violence and sexual offences.39 Support groups for Paradjanov were formed internationally, to promote his liberation from prison. A petition with 5,000 signatures, which included the names of artists and writers with a worldwide reputation, and film directors including Pasolini, Bu˜nuel, Agnes Varda, Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Jacques Tati, Fellini, Visconti, Rossellini,

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Antonioni, Bertolucci, was submitted to the Soviet authorities with no effect. On a visit to the USSR, the French Surrealist poet Louis Aragon asked Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet president, to free Paradjanov from prison. Released about a year early, he was nevertheless forbidden to make films. Consequently, over a period of 15 years, Paradjanov was unable to make any films. During this period, which included the years he spent in prison and prison camps, he made collages, assemblages, hats, drawings, reliefs, boxes, dolls, clothes. He poured his imagination, energy and humour into these works, which effectively are like scenes and sketches for films, but they are also works of art equal to his achievements in cinema. Paradjanov explained this aspect of his work: ‘I was not allowed to make films and I started to make collages. Collage is a compressed film.’40 In 1984, with the help of the Georgian film studios in Tbilisi, and the actor and film director Dodo Abachidze, Paradjanov was able to make The Legend of the Surami Fortress. The film became an international success. In 1987 Paradjanov made his last completed film, Achik Kerib, also in collaboration with Dodo Abachidze. He dedicated the film to his friend the film director Andrei Tarkovsky, who had died from lung cancer the previous year. Based on an Azeri epic as told by the writer, poet and painter Mikhail Lermontov, Achik Kerib was filmed in a village in Azerbaijan. The part of the poet-musician Achik Kerib was played by Yuri Mgoyan, a young neighbour of Paradjanov in Tbilisi, who had never acted before, and Mgoyan’s mother made all the costumes for the film. Like Pasolini, Paradjanov was good at improvising – a skill made possible by careful preparation. Stylisation is a key part of this skill: Paradjanov points out that to make films successfully you have to have a capacity for childlike invention, and an ability to transform things. For example, when faced with a scene during which Achik Kerib faces a tiger, Paradjanov improvised and used a pantomime tiger with a revolving head, which amusingly expresses the idea of a tiger in the carnivalesque tradition of popular processions in local festivals, the world of the ashik.41 In 1988 Paradjanov was permitted to travel internationally to attend film festivals which featured his work.42 In 1989, after three days spent filming his last project, Confession, at his family home in Tbilisi, Paradjanov was taken to hospital and

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diagnosed as having lung cancer. He died the following year in Yerevan. His funeral was attended by an estimated 50,000 people. He was buried in the Armenian Pantheon, next to the composer Aram Katchaturian. In 1991 the Paradjanov Museum opened in Yerevan: it contains the hundreds of collages, assemblages, hats and drawings he made, and his film scenarios, which remain largely unpublished.43

The Legend of the Surami Fortress (1984) In this film Paradjanov tells an ancient story about a Georgian fortress. As it is being built it keeps collapsing, and we see eventually how the solution to this mysterious problem was found. There is hardly any dialogue. There are altar-like mises-en-sc`ene, in which the protagonists move in a stylised and sometimes dancelike way. These settings, which are often symmetrical, resemble the arrangements of symbolic objects on altars, whose potential for stasis is enlivened by the erratic movements of living animals. Such movements and other irregularities are heightened by the symmetrical structure, and as with Rorschach ink-blots we invariably find ourselves comparing the two sides of these symmetrical compositions. In cinema these arrangements may appear to be unusual, but they are normal in the context of rites and festivities. For example, in the home of an Iranian student, I saw a table laid for the Zoroastrian New Year celebration. On it were displayed a variety of symbolic objects: decorated eggs, a pot of green shoots of wheat, lit candles, apples, a bowl of sumac berries, sweet pudding, a hyacinth, small pastries, a pomegranate with coins inserted into it, a bowl of nuts, berries and raisins, rosewater, wine, a holy book, a bowl of goldfish, and a mirror. The mirror and the holy book placed below it are at the centre, with the other objects arranged symmetrically around it. The goldfish represent animal life, and so they are an irregularly moving component in the display, much like the animals and birds in Paradjanov’s films. As the Zoroastrian New Year celebration takes place in and around the countries and cultures of Central Asia, the objects displayed vary, depending on climate and local produce, and a range of religious beliefs. Paradjanov uses these kinds of symmetry in the composition of his shots to express the nature of the location and the characteristics of the

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society in which the story in his film develops. Location is of primary importance for Paradjanov: the people, their costumes and clothes, their objects, their music and speech, are all related to the landscape from which they emerge; they are all part of the events we experience audiovisually in his films. Paradjanov makes extensive use of montage within the shot, a technique developed by Eisenstein when he was filming Que viva Mexico! in 1930–32. This method relies on the juxtapositions of the various elements in the shot, a bringing together of foreground, middle ground and background: people, objects, animals, and landscape. A living collage effect is produced – Paradjanov also features the colourful juxtapositions and patterning of designs from the various cultures within the Trans-Caucasus region: Armenia, Georgia, southern Russia, Azerbaijan, northern Turkey, and northern Iran – some of the countries through which passed the Silk Road, with the continually changing confluence of cultures in its inns or caravanserai. In between making films, or when he was prevented from filmmaking by the Soviet authorities, Paradjanov traded in antiques, art and second-hand objects, like his father had done before him. Out of these objects, and things people had thrown away, he made collages, at times using shards of smashed glass vases and broken highly decorated bowls to make explosive and dynamic reliefs, more expressive than the gaudy originals. Using assemblage (a 3-D collage made from various materials) he designed hats, made dolls and costumes. He also combined various found objects with reproductions of paintings, and made collages of cut-up reproductions. These works emerge from local traditions, as in the decorated wreath framing the painting of an ancestor, in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Paradjanov combines local colour and tradition with collage and assemblage techniques from twentieth-century art. In The Legend of the Surami Fortress he displays an assemblage of seven mounted and framed butterflies, suspended in a loose symmetry against sun-dappled trees and green berries, preceding the scene of the Feast of Berike.44 In his work Paradjanov uses collage to express the bringing together and the clashing of the varied cultures which form the vast TransCaucasus region, or other mixed cultures like in the Carpathian Mountains region, which comprises parts of Romania, parts of the Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. His work is not narrowly

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local, artificially restricted to a single culture, but emphasises the mix of cultures present in any locality. In The Colour of Pomegranates, the young poet-musician Sayat Nova holds up a large charred sheet on which is written, in three white lines of Arabic script, his poetry in Azeri, a language found in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Northern Persia. Then we hear the same lines recited in Azeri, Armenian, and in Georgian, as the poet wrote in these three languages.45 Collage is a key formal and audiovisual method for Paradjanov. For example, in the Berike Festival scene we are shown a dance with a visual superimposition of different layers of movement, representing the scene of St George rescuing the princess from the dragon. This legend is associated with the Georgian nation, and it is presented here in a choreographed and stylised performance, in four simultaneous layers: 1. The mist moves from right to left in the background, with a fixed source of brilliant light which appears to be directed towards the camera by a large circular mirror. At first a silhouette of a swaying pennant gives the light a slight rhythmic oscillation. 2. Dancers covered in green-blue muslin, together represent the dragon which moves forwards and backwards, and in wave-like movements up and down. 3. The princess is tied to the dragon, and she also moves to and fro, in counterpoint with its movements, beseeching St George to rescue her. 4. A horse with silver housings is carefully controlled by his rider, St George. The horse is moved backwards and forwards in the style of the tightly choreographed small steps reminiscent of the Lipizzaner Spanish Riding School in Vienna. These layers of variations on forward and backward movements together assemble in a four-part visual-rhythmic counterpoint. A fast dance rhythm, performed on a local drum, and similar in energy to a lezginka dance, adds another layer. The result is an audiovisual counterpoint: four lines of visual rhythm are combined, in counterpoint with a rhythmic line of dance music. The dynamism of scenes like this derive from a frontal and often symmetrical disposition of the actors, evoking mystery play

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performances, and other semi-professional or even amateur productions, like choreographed school performances, or celebratory ceremonies. Paradjanov was aware of criticisms regarding what was at times considered to be poor acting in his films. Sofiko Chiaureli was a favourite actress of his, and she explained that there was hardly any preparatory work with the actors when he was filming: he would simply show them a facial expression and an attitude that they should reproduce. If the actor did not quite succeed, then Paradjanov would accept what they proposed, without any fuss. He admitted that he didn’t understand the Stanislavsky system of acting, and that instead he much preferred the ‘typage’ approach, which he attributed to his admiration for Pasolini’s use of typage in his films Oedipus Rex (1967) and Medea (1969). In addition Paradjanov extended the typage idea by occasionally having the same person playing different roles in the same film. For example, in The Colour of Pomegranates Sofiko Chiaureli plays five roles: the young poet-musician Sayat Nova, his true love Princess Anna, a nun, the Angel of the Resurrection, and a mime.46 Paradjanov affirmed that his work with music and sound ‘was always collage’. This approach could take the form of quoting on a Turkish lute a famous melodic fragment from the orchestral music by Adolphe Adam for the ballet Giselle, in combination with a woman singing in a traditional Turkish style, a voice-over, and natural sounds emerging from the visual track, when Achik Kerib returns to claim his future bride. Another aspect of collage in sound used by Paradjanov, and very much like Pasolini, is dubbing. For Ashik Kerib he spent much time finding suitable voices for two of the actors in this film: for the voice of the young girl, he found a student from a boarding school in Baku, and he recorded a well-known singer from Azerbaijan, who performed at weddings and funerals, for the voice of the actor who plays Ashik Kerib.47 Paradjanov is not concerned to have synchronised sound for his voices: often his characters are shown in long shot, and so we don’t notice any lack of synchrony between the movement of their mouths and the words they speak, declaim or sing. Even if a protagonist is in close-up, there’s no concern for ‘lip-sync’. This is partly because the actors may be speaking in Azeri, Georgian, Armenian, Hutsul, or other language or dialect, in which case their words may be spoken in Russian through a voice-over. This practice is part of Paradjanov’s

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focus on the mix of cultures he is showing us: his explanatory intertitles will not normally be in Russian. But there is also another, spiritual dimension, as Paradjanov explains: ‘I am an improvisatory filmmaker, I am archaic . . . In my films people don’t speak to each other, you have the impression that they’re all deaf and dumb. That may be true, but people in paintings look at each other, but they don’t speak. In a religious fresco, the Virgin doesn’t speak to Jesus, no more than the angels do.’48 This stylised separation between the protagonists and their voices provides a release from an audiovisual convention, which allows all kinds of audiovisual combinations to be used, including a sense of intimacy when required in a long shot, a sense of the sacred, of the comical, and the expressive possibilities of giving a voice to an actor which is not actually their own voice, but is theirs in the film, both spoken and sung.49 The method of collage also surfaces in Paradjanov’s frequent use of jump cuts in his transitions from scene to scene. Jump cuts are noticeable cuts, as the shots on either side of the cut are very similar. These collage-like sudden juxtapositions resemble the sudden transitions which feature in textiles and other brightly coloured designs from the ancient hybrid cultures in which Paradjanov’s films are set. Such sudden transitions are also a feature in traditional storytelling, and are very useful when the storyteller, the ashik, describes magical appearances and disappearances, and transformations, characteristic of the legendary and mythical dimensions of these stories. These sudden instantaneous leaps give Paradjanov’s films a similarly magical and mythical quality. In addition he uses historical jump cuts: temporal leaps within the frame in the form of anachronisms, like the appearance of modern tankers in the background of the port scene in The Legend of the Surami Fortress, and signallers using semaphore flags, and plastic submachine guns fired by the guards who protect the wealthy Turkish merchant in Ashik Kerib.50 Mixtures, a collage of cultures, the interpenetration of religious traditions, as in the Caucasus and the countries surrounding it, provide the dynamism in Paradjanov’s films. Different musical styles, instrumental and vocal, local instruments with unique timbres, come straight from the environment, both outside and indoors. The caravanserai, the inns on the Silk Road, with their mobile mixtures of traditions, are expressed in a vast array of people, animals, objects, costumes,

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textures, colours, landscapes. There is no naturalism in Paradjanov: all is presented on an equal level, whether what he shows is a waterfall, a face, a wine jug, a flock of sheep. Nature here is what Eisenstein called ‘nonindifferent’, based on the subjective experience of the storyteller.51 Consequently, in these films, Paradjanov is not a producer of a Stalinist social realist, packaged and pasteurised folk art, to be artificially recreated in an anonymous field, through the order to dance. Paradjanov’s work is not narrowly local; it emerges from localities, with their everyday weddings, funerals, festivals and other rites, energies deriving from a smashed collage of cultures. He doesn’t present stasis, like larks’ tongues preserved in aspic, but an interaction, a continuously growing mix of cultures, including anachronisms, dynamic juxtapositions, mobile symmetries offsetting order.

A selection of Paradjanov’s comments Pasolini is like a god to me. Films should be made for their artistic value, not as commercial projects. Eisenstein died with only an iota of his potential fulfilled. Everything I have seen by Pasolini I have found equally striking – his principles, his spiritual approach to the Bible, which he raised to the level of a mission . . . He led me to discover astonishing aspects of the world, whether it is in Antiquity, Rome, Arab countries, or simply contemporary life.52 You can imprison the body, but not the imagination.53 There are certain rare moments in life where you find that you challenge all the usual ideas, rules and attitudes, so that they change their value. These are moments of extreme tension in which your awareness is stimulated to a maximum degree, like a double door thrown wide open. Each thought, each image that hits you attracts hundreds of other images, similar or different. These are instances when the self disappears, moments of life that are passionate and intense. 54

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. . . it’s no use just telling the story in a film. If I tried to do it, everything would fall apart. It’s not possible to study briefly a film’s emotional, chromatic, formal and rhythmic structure. The assembly of these elements only takes shape when the succession of shots transforms itself into a wholly realised film.55

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12 ‘The echo of many voices’: Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) Derek Jarman was born in 1942. His mother was English, his father from New Zealand. His father served in the Royal Air Force during World War II as a reconnaissance pilot. He was known for being unnaturally calm when flying through anti-aircraft fire. Jarman studied History, English and Art at King’s College London, as his father insisted on a university education (Jarman enjoyed Art at school and had wanted to go to art school). He went on to study at the Slade School of Art in London, and his paintings were exhibited at a number of well-known London galleries, including the Tate Gallery and the Lisson Gallery, as well as in group shows for young artists in Edinburgh and in Paris. He became a costume and scene designer for the Royal Ballet, the Ballet Rambert, and the English National Opera. He then worked as a set designer for two films directed by Ken Russell: The Devils (1970) and Savage Messiah (1972).1 Through a friend who loaned him a Super 8 camera, he began to make diary and experimental films.2 So his way into making films was through 35 mm and Super 8 film. Jarman was also a writer of journals in which he documented the progress of his work, his travels, his encounters with well-known artists, his private life, and gay liberation activism. These journals were edited and published as books.3 Like Eisenstein, he was very interested in alchemy.4

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Jarman began to film in Super 8 in 1970. He found that other experimental filmmakers at the London Film-makers’ Co-op were involved in the ‘destructuring of film’, and that for someone like him, who had ‘stumbled on film like a panacea[,] this seemed a rather negative pursuit’. When he received his first rolls of developed Super 8 film ‘the whole thing seemed magical – an instrument to bring dreams to life’. He found that Jung’s Alchemical Studies and Seven Sermons to the Dead provided the key to the imagery he had so far been using unconsciously in his Super 8 films. This experience gave him the confidence to allow his ‘dream-images to drift and collide at random’.5 His last film, Blue (1993), was made when Jarman was dying of AIDS, and he was almost blind. In January 1992 he wrote in his journal: ‘if Beethoven could write the Ninth without hearing, I’m certain I could make a film without seeing.’6 However, he had his first idea for this film in 1987, when he wanted to make a film about a colour, in particular one about blue, and another film about red, but he couldn’t decide whether or not these films should have a visual track.7 In 1994, shortly after his death, Chroma, his book on colour was published. In Chroma he devotes a section to each colour, as well as sections on translucence and iridescence, partly influenced by Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colour, as well as many references to artists and scientists who wrote about colour, and his own observations. The text for Blue is in this book.8 Earlier in Chroma, in the section about the colour red, he compares the temporal quality of red with that of blue:

Red is a moment in time. Blue constant.9

In 1987, shortly after he was diagnosed with AIDS, Jarman bought a fisherman’s house, Prospect Cottage, at Dungeness, and he created a garden around it on the pebble beach. He mentions it in Chroma, in the section on grey (‘Grey Matter’), where he points out that artists’ studios often have grey walls, like those of G´ericault and Matisse. He refers to colour in synaesthetic terms: 154

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For Jarman, music and vision combine naturally: he began making music videos in 1976, for the Sex Pistols, and made over twenty of them throughout the rest of his life, as a way of earning a living, for artists including Throbbing Gristle, The Smiths, the Pet Shop Boys, Bob Geldof and Patti Smith. In 1975 Jarman made his first feature film Sebastiane, a candid depiction of homoeroticism. Entirely in Latin, it is based on the story of the martyrdom of St Sebastian, a saint of traditionally androgynous appearance, portrayed in many paintings in the Christian tradition, where he is shown naked and pierced by arrows.11 Jarman also made feature films about Britain’s post-imperial decline: Jubilee (1977) and The Last of England (1987). Then, after years of attempts to find funding, production money was found for Caravaggio, which was released in 1986. A film by a painter about a painter, Jarman used Caravaggio’s chiaoscuro lighting in his film, recreating some of the Italian master’s paintings in progress. However, Jarman’s film isn’t just a period piece, as he has his seventeenth-century characters use a calculator, a typewriter and a motorbike to bring the past to life, to make it relevant to the present. Paradjanov also uses this deliberate use of anachronism in his film The Legend of the Surami Fortress (1984), with its images of merchant shipping in the background of one of its scenes, and its choreographies of figures sending messages by semaphore. In The Garden (1990) Jarman used his garden around Prospect Cottage, the shingle beach landscape, and huge abandoned concrete acoustic mirrors as a setting for the scenes in his film. He also included Super 8 footage, at times combining two kinds of film gauge in the same scene to produce a dreamlike instability of image. He also uses a variety of voice choruses combining declamation and singing, and superimposes various pitches based on the glass harmonica technique of rubbing the dampened edge of wine glasses. These musical elements, contributed in collaboration with the composer Simon Fisher Turner, contribute to the stylisation and audiovisual counterpoints used in this

‘THE ECHO OF MANY VOICES’: DEREK JARMAN’S BLUE (1993)

In the grey days of spring The colours sing in my garden. Colour sings in the grey.10

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Sitting in Eisenstein’s study With a home movie camera Imagining October A cinema of small gestures12

film. Fisher Turner also composed music for Caravaggio, The Last of England, Edward II (1991) and Blue. Jarman filmed using his Super 8 camera when he went to Moscow and Baku on a BFI sponsored trip for filmmakers in 1984. In Moscow he visited and filmed Eisenstein’s study, and made a film called Imagining October:

Jarman intended to make films on a very different scale to Eisenstein’s epic film October. He wanted to use Super 8, as he would not have to be dependent on waiting for large sums of money to create his ‘cinema of small gestures’. As he put it: Market forces . . . audience ratings Best means to crush Effective Expression of independent conscience.13

An example of this kind of cinema is The Angelic Conversation (1985), filmed in Super 8, with Judi Dench reading a selection of sonnets by Shakespeare. Influenced by Jung, Jarman shot the film first, then he matched the shots to the poems.14 This approach is based on apparently random details and chance audiovisual combinations, united in meaning through what Jung described as ‘synchronicity’. This technique has parallels with the way Jarman used a kind of bricolage (a collage in 3-D) to make informal sculptures for his garden, by assembling driftwood, stones and metal he had found on the shingle beach. There was a relatively tiny budget for his penultimate film, Wittgenstein (1993), produced by Tariq Ali for a series of films on a selection of philosophers, for Channel 4 television. The entire film was shot on a sound stage, with the actors working each day until midnight. Everyone involved was aware that this would probably be Jarman’s last film. In it he develops techniques he used in The Garden, making use of a few details to evoke a whole environment, whether it’s the Vienna of Wittgenstein’s family, the philosopher’s time at Manchester University, or his interaction with Bertrand Russell, his mentor at Cambridge. 156

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‘THE ECHO OF MANY VOICES’: DEREK JARMAN’S BLUE (1993)

These short scenes are fragments, each a ‘pars pro toto’, a part which stands for the whole. Wittgenstein often used short sections of text to articulate his thought, and Jarman follows this technique in the way he presents the scenes in his film. Already in The Garden Jarman is using such techniques, for example in the scenes where he shows a schoolboy standing on a table, writing lines on a blackboard, doing a chemistry experiment, acting in a play, and whirling a globe. His dour teachers sit round and rhythmically beat canes on the table – one grimaces eccentrically as he opens a book at random several times; another attempts to speed up the flow of sand in an hourglass. These actions are not literal but figurative; they represent wider actions, and show a certain cultural and intellectual context, like their counterparts in Wittgenstein, in the scene showing the philosopher when he was at school, plugging his ears against the rapid polyphonic mutterings of his teachers, delivered in a spoken voice chorus. In 1984, as part of the trip for filmmakers to the Soviet Union, Jarman had visited Baku. In his journal he wrote about how he had been taken to a performance of a play ‘about rival Azerbaijan and Georgian families. It was easy to understand, performed as it was in song and dance.’15 Elements of this audiovisual approach are in The Garden, and a musical use of sound is there in both The Garden and Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s use of short sections of text, each section expressing a thought, is also used by Jarman in his book about colour, Chroma. This method is very useful, as quotes, examples and observations are separately articulated, but at the same time create a developing collage of thought, in which each fragment can be related to any other fragment. This means that such texts can be read and re-read, as new connections between the fragments are noticed with each reading. Josef Albers wrote in fragments in this way, in his textbook Interaction of Color. In this book he explores our perception of colour using his own observations, as well as the theories and studies of scientists, and other artists.16 As Blue is a film in which Jarman combines a single colour with a collage of voices, sounds and music, a point Albers makes about the interaction of colour and sound is of interest:

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Though we were taught, only a few years ago, that there is no connection whatever between visual and auditory perception, we know now that a color changes visually when a changing tone is heard simultaneously.17

Jarman chose Yves Klein’s International Blue for the whole of his film. Do we see this unchanging blue change because of the sounds we are hearing? What do we see when we watch Blue?

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13 Three Russians: The Audiovisual and the Long Take The Coronation Scene in Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part 1 (1944) Eisenstein mentions that the philosopher Friedrich Engels believed that religious beliefs and spiritual qualities of various kinds grow directly from the specific character of the local landscape.1 The poet Novalis is also quoted by Eisenstein – before Engels he had stated that ‘Any landscape is the ideal body for the expression of a definite system of thought.’2 Eisenstein’s idea of ‘nonindifferent nature’ was in part a development of these ideas. Consider the vast Russian steppes, stretching from western Russia to eastern Siberia, on either side of the Ural Mountains: this scale of the rolling unending landscape is expressed in the melodic, harmonic and spiritual qualities of the music sung by unaccompanied voices in the Russian Orthodox service. Unlike the Catholic or Anglican services, with their single climax at the point of communion (just before the ritual ends), the Russian Orthodox service is based on a system of rolling climaxes, which open up vast perspectives of time and space. These services last several hours and the normal sense of time is disrupted. There is a drift into a meditative state, which at the same time provokes strong emotions. This transformation from the everyday to a spiritually active state is assisted by the ecstatic quality of a seamless blend of choral voices. 159

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The Russian Orthodox choir is placed high above the congregation, invisible, at the back, where the organ is placed in Western churches, and it is put there for the same reason, as planes of sound are projected into the space above, an evocation of celestial music. In the Coronation scene at the start of Ivan the Terrible there exists a musical anachronism. Tsar Ivan composed hymns (stichera) for the Russian Orthodox service, but the religious music of his time (the sixteenth century) was stark, almost harsh in comparison to the later rich choral textures which Prokofiev and Eisenstein chose to use to match the grandeur of the scene, with its architectural splendour and opulent costumes and jewels. Both Eisenstein and Prokofiev were familiar with the audiovisual power of such Russian Orthodox services, as they had attended them when they were young, before the Russian Revolution. There’s also an important historical context: Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, had started in June 1941. In response, Stalin evacuated whole industries away from the invading Nazi armies, including the film industry, which he transferred to AlmaAta, the capital of Kazakhstan. Eisenstein worked on the script and the filming of Ivan the Terrible in Alma-Ata from October 1941 to June 1944. Stalin, within a year of the Nazi invasion, had reopened Russian Orthodox churches and liberated its priests from prison, in an attempt to inspire his people, including those who were under siege in Leningrad and Stalingrad. So what has all this to do with the long take? Space, time and music on a huge scale, like Russian Orthodox music, need the long take to express this vastness. Eisenstein’s choreography of the priests’ procession, their ritual movements, needs the time the long take provides. The close-ups of the jewelled trappings of power, the crown, orb and sceptre, join the montage within the shot Eisenstein uses to show the splendour of the costumes of the priests in the context of the cathedral’s vast spaces. This wealth is counterpointed audiovisually with Eisenstein’s instructions for the choral music for this scene: Kyrie Eleison! – comes ecstatically from the choir on the right. Kyrie Eleison! – comes ecstatically from the choir on the left. (then) Kyrie Eleison! – the two choirs sing in unison.

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rings resoundingly. Rings out the ecstatic Kyrie Eleison! of the Cathedral choir.3 So Eisenstein is also a master of the long take, with which he is mistakenly rarely associated.

Andrei Tarkovsky, The Sacrifice (1986): The beginning and the end For The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky wanted a special quality of light, from the far north in summer, the kind of light found in midsummer in St Petersburg: daylight at midnight. Due to his problems with the Soviet film authorities, Tarkovsky, a great admirer of Ingmar Bergman’s work, decided to film The Sacrifice in the same region chosen by the Swedish director for his films. He even selected a well-known actor in Bergman’s films, Erland Josephson, to play the part of Alexander, the retired actor. And, to capture the dreamlike suspended quality of the midsummer light in this part of Sweden, he chose Bergman’s cinematographer, Sven Nyquist. The music Tarkovsky uses in combination with the opening credits of The Sacrifice is the aria for alto voice, Erbarme Dich, Mein Gott (Have pity on me, my Lord) from J.S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion. The credits are superimposed on a detail from a painting, Adoration of the Magi, by Leonardo da Vinci. The audiovisual combination of work by two of the greatest artists in Western European culture establishes from the start a sense that we shall be watching a film which will deal with the most fundamental questions we can face. As the credits end and the music by Bach fades, Tarkovsky has the camera travel upwards, revealing the figure of the Christ child. He combines this rising shot through Leonardo’s painting with the cries of seagulls and the sound of gentle waves breaking on the beach. In his music, J.S. Bach uses and maintains pulses which can have the effect of altering the pace of our breathing, in some cases slowing it down to encourage in us a meditative state. By using the soft

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And Eisenstein uses expanded editing to extend the time the gold coins are poured over Ivan’s head. The shower of gold

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breath-like sounds of these waves which approach, break gently, and recede, Tarkovsky encourages and maintains a slow meditative rate of breathing, probably without us even being aware of what is happening. In the St Matthew Passion, the aria Erbarme Dich is sung after Peter has betrayed Christ three times. The representation of the Christ child inevitably brings to mind the shadow of the crucifixion, and Tarkovsky’s choice of this particular aria by Bach, an expression of universal human suffering, reinforces this tragic aspect in the representation of Christ as a baby in his mother’s arms. As the camera continues to travel upwards, a profusion of palm fronds and leaves at the top of Leonardo’s painting is revealed, an image of great fertility. This image is in complete contrast to the leafless branches of the apparently dead tree which we see next, being planted by Alexander and his son, by the sea, in a low-lying denuded landscape. Alexander tells his young son a story about a monk who decided to plant a leafless tree. He watered it regularly, almost ritually, and after three years it came back to life: it was resurrected. Another theme is added to this religious imagery when Alexander compares the stark beauty of the bare branches of the tree to an ikebana display, the Japanese art of arranging plants, branches and flowers. By this stage Tarkovsky has presented, through carefully composed audiovisual means, the themes of life, death and resurrection that he explores in his film. When Otto, the part-time postman, arrives, we learn that Alexander is a well-known retired actor, a literary and theatre critic, and lecturer in aesthetics. He is also an atheist. Otto, who has a philosophical turn of mind, discusses Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Recurrence with Alexander. This is the idea that eternal life necessarily means that our existence will inevitably pass through every possible variation of occurrences, until the entire process begins again, and continues with every possible variation, each vast cycle of variations echoing for eternity. During the film we see what happens when Alexander, his family and friends experience the anguish of the certainty of nuclear annihilation: a newsflash has just informed them of the beginning of a third world war. In spite of his atheism, Alexander prays to God, saying that he will sacrifice everything he loves in order to reverse this final catastrophe. What has happened may well be part of a dream. When

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Alexander wakes up and finds that all is normal, he has a breakdown and he sets fire to his country house, when his family and the maid are out, taking a walk together. The Japanese theme returns here: during their walk the family mention the ‘Japanese tree’ planted by Alexander and his son, and how they are both ‘crazy about Japan’ and that they see themselves as probably having been Japanese in a previous life. Meanwhile Alexander puts on his Japanese kimono, sets fire to his house, and turns on a recording of Japanese bamboo flute music. The filming of the burning of the country house became a dramatic event in itself. Tarkovsky wanted to use just one camera to film the long take he had planned, of the burning house and the reactions of Alexander, his family and friends. Nyquist recommended the use of two cameras, but Tarkovsky only wanted to use one: it broke down well before the take was finished. The entire house had to be re-built over a two week period, and the long take was shot again, with two cameras. The tension at this point was immense, an example of what Eisenstein calls ‘pathos’, extreme emotion, which here was present both within the film and in the actual making of it. This extreme emotion is resolved when there is a straight cut from the house on fire collapsing, to a quiet view of Alexander’s son carrying buckets of water towards the bare tree seen at the beginning of the film. Mysterious calls are heard – the sounds of local cowherds calling home from a distance across the fields. The maid with supposed supernatural powers arrives on a bicycle. The ambulance passes by, and the boy appears to be unaware that his father is in it. As he begins to water the tree, Tarkovsky fades in the aria Erbarme Dich from the St Matthew Passion, and he gradually fades out all other sounds. Bach’s music now in full flow begins to alter our pace of breathing, producing a meditative state. The maid watches the boy water the tree before she cycles away into the distance, and the music merges with the landscape. Having completed the watering of the leafless tree, the boy takes a well-earned rest, lying down beneath it. As he lies there he thinks, and he utters the first words that he speaks in the film: ‘In the beginning was the Word. What does that mean, Papa?’ No single answer to this question is readily available, but the word in general was at the centre of his father’s life, and it was also at the heart of the philosophical discussions during the film. Now the camera

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rises in a crane shot moving up the bare branches of the tree; this upward movement parallels the beginning of the film, where we heard the same aria by Bach, combined with a similar shot rising through the central details of Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi. Set against this stark landscape the bare ‘Japanese tree’ is a fragment of something greater, like the aria from the St Matthew Passion. Eisenstein mentions the concept of the pars pro toto, the part standing for the whole. His teacher, Meyerhold, to explain this concept, quoted Peter Altenberg: ‘to say a lot with a little – that’s the secret. The task of the artist is to use the greatest riches with the most prudent economy. The Japanese have only to draw one blossoming twig to evoke an entire spring.’4 This concentration on a single element is a characteristic of dreams. As the camera rises, following the trunk of the tree, the landscape disappears, and the tree’s branches become flat against the brilliance of the sun reflected on the sea, a montage within the shot, as in a Japanese print. With the music by Bach, this audiovisual combination produces an ecstatic effect, suggesting resurrection. Within months of shooting The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky was diagnosed with lung cancer, and he died in December 1986. At the end of his film he placed a dedication to his son, Andriosha, ‘with hope and confidence’.

Alexander Sokurov’s audiovisual landscapes With continent-sized countries, the sounds of trains you hear at night take on a special quality. In the late night’s quiet you hear in the distance the locomotive’s whistle, or its horn, or the repeated clang of its bell, and you know that this train will be travelling thousands of miles, across different time zones; this is something which changes your perspective. The presence of landscape, and its scale which swallows the human presence in it, exists throughout Sokurov’s film Mother and Son (1997). Sokurov provides us with an audiovisual montage within the shot: in later scenes when the son is shown wandering through a rural landscape, a train passes. But we don’t only hear its distant whistle and rhythm, we also hear piano music as if from a room in the distance, and we hear wind and the sound of surf. But there is no sea in the shot, or anything which would suggest somewhere where a piano could be 164

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emotional plurality of human responses to landscapes. These responses are dependent on the individual’s state of mind at the time, interacting with the plurality of states in which the landscape appears, in calm or stormy weather, or at different times of the day or night [ . . . ] The interactions which result from the mixing of these variables create a range of emotional responses which are much greater, more ambiguous and subtle than that provided by the one-to-one nature/emotion equivalence found in the Romantic approach to landscape.

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being played. The montage within the shot of the young man, the train and the landscape, is offset by an audio-montage which exists within the long take, creating an audiovisual montage within the shot. This approach is like Eisenstein’s concept of ‘nonindifferent nature’. The landscape becomes ‘subjectified’. It exists not only in terms of straightforward correspondences of emotion and landscape, as in the Romantic pathetic fallacy, in which the sad mood of a person is reflected in a landscape which matches their mood in sadness, but one where any kind of feeling is combined with any landscape. There is an

Eisenstein notes ‘How many varied storms and forests, suns in branches and surfs appear here to each individual imagination, how many different ones – to the same person on different days, at different hours, at different moments’ in their emotional lives.5 Sokurov achieves this ‘subjectification’ of the landscapes in his film by using distorting lenses and mirrors. His landscapes in Mother and Son evoke the quality of light and the dark yet vivid green in Manet’s landscapes. On several occasions Sokurov has the son disappearing into the landscape, as if he merges with it. This is what Eisenstein does in Que viva Mexico! with a shot of a group of peons on horseback who disappear in a cactus grove; they are de-materialised in the complex dappled shadows.6 In Mother and Son there are no stars, no celebrity actors to disrupt the direct impulse from screen to audience. Sokurov chose nonprofessional actors – the man who plays the part of the son is a mathematician. In 1922, the French art historian Elie Faure envisaged, three years before Eisenstein’s first film The Strike, a type of cinema which would 165

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function as an ‘audiovisual art’, where the roles of stars would become redundant: cinema would move away from a theatrical model and would become a medium closer to dance and music, and one in which synaesthesia could be released as an expressive force. Faure’s idea of a film ‘unfolding in a musical space’ enabled him to imagine cinema with the potential to be ‘a kind of visual symphony as rich, as complex . . . as the symphonies in sound by the greatest composers’.7 There is a wide-angle shot which lasts over 40 minutes from Sokurov’s Spiritual Voices (1995). There are no actors, only the slow changes we experience in the winter landscape we are watching, as the day gradually fades into night. The occasional cross-fades are very long, so that the changes from one shot to another are barely noticeable, and we are hardly aware that the changes we are witnessing are not taking place in real time. Occasionally there’s movement, as when a flock of birds appear – are they superimposed on the landscape? Sokurov provides extracts from music by Mozart, Beethoven, and Messiaen, and he makes comments about them and other things, like a friend might, as you both watch a landscape from a window, and extracts from music are selected and played as you look out. The sense of intimacy in this audiovisual combination has more in common with the effect of a Russian Symbolist painting which shows a landscape ‘in the violet hour’, at dusk, than any film involving actors. It is an example of a film which unfolds ‘in a musical space’.

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14 Intertransparency and the Leaping Elements: Robert Robertson and Dennis Dracup, Empedocles (1995) A music/film collaboration from the inside1 It all started when I was looking through a photography book – devoted to the unusual subject of wrought iron belfries from Provence. Next to some of the photographs were quotes from a famous writer or philosopher. This one in particular astonished me: The elements are eternally identical in their being, Leaping through one another, All things are born of their dislocated unity.2

Here was clear evidence of a dynamism of thought I hadn’t found in the philosophy I’d previously encountered. An extraordinary idea imbued with energy; the building of dynamic entities from a negative concept: dislocation! I had to explore further. The philosopher in question was elusive – I could find no books about him in English. The book on Provenc¸al belfries was French, and it was only at the British Library that I found what I was looking for – books (in French) about the life and ideas of this obscure philosopher. 167

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After a few weeks of research I wrote a libretto for a dance opera about the life and ideas of Empedocles, a remarkable early Greek shamanistic philosopher. In English he was nearly always mentioned in conjunction with Heraclitus and Parmenides, under the rubric of the pre-Socratic philosophers, as if they were simply a warm-up band before the main attraction, Socrates. Empedocles is also found as a footnote in books on alchemy, or in general histories of philosophy, where he is mentioned as the originator of the idea of the four elements Earth, Air, Fire and Water. This concept was probably derived from African philosophy, via Egypt, and Empedocles combined it with the motor forces of Love and Hate, an idea which he took from Far Eastern thought. To go deeper into the subject I visited Sicily (during the time of Empedocles it was called Greater Greece) and went to the sites with which he is associated: Agrigento and Selinunte. I also walked up through the lava fields of Etna, where I didn’t encounter fire – but got caught in a snowstorm, an elemental experience in that weird metamorphic landscape, which rapidly changed from dark red/black, to white. I’d composed the music for the whole of the first half of the work, and then I came to the scene at the centre of the dance opera, in which Empedocles’ key ideas about evolution are expressed. These ideas were to be developed more than 2,000 years later, and yet, in spite of the fact that this scene was one of the first I had imagined, and I had been most excited about, I had no ideas for the music that I should compose for it. This problem was completely unexpected, as the origin of the whole dance opera had its roots in the way I had imagined this central and key part of the entire work. I could see the strange hybrid forms he described: ‘heads without necks, arms separated from their bodies, eyes without faces, composite creatures – beings whose feet turn when walking, and who have innumerable hands, hermit crabs awkwardly moving’ (Fig.4) – but I still had no idea what music to compose for this key scene. After several days of attempts to find musical ideas, in desperation I tore up all the music I’d already written for the first half of the dance opera. However, I did make sure I’d photocopied it first. Then I mixed the torn fragments in a bag, and, in the order I took them out, I stuck the fragments together on several large sheets of paper. I chose my favourite combinations – all of them quite beyond what I

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could have imagined. But I felt that they were close to the expression and evocations of the strange hybrid creatures described by Empedocles in the surviving fragments we have of his thought (Fig. 5).

A music/film collaboration Three choreographers in three different countries were keen to realise this work in dance. However it turned out that my initial inability to compose the music for the evolution scene in Empedocles was later matched by the impossibility of finding enough financial support for a stage production of this dance opera. But out of this failure emerged something completely new. At a screening of underground films held in the basement of an old pub in London, near London Bridge station, I saw Anima Grado,

INTERTRANSPARENCY AND THE LEAPING ELEMENTS: ROBERT ROBERTSON AND DENNIS DRACUP, EMPEDOCLES (1995)

Figure 4. ‘Heads without necks.’

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Figure 5. Music from the ‘evolution’ scene, Act 2, Scene 2.

a short film by Dennis Dracup, the artist/filmmaker. I was struck by his use of colour and film animation, combined with his own music, and also by his concept of a ‘choreography of light’. Then, several days later, looking out from a plane on the way back to London from a trip to Berlin, I had an idea. What about asking Dennis if he would be interested to use his choreography of light concept to make films for scenes he would choose from the libretto? Empedocles could be presented in the form of a musical performance, with some of the scenes shown on film. After having read the libretto, Dennis decided that he would like to realise the whole opera on film, and he showed me a technique of projecting cross-fading slides into film to create a visual counterpoint for the music. This technique of slide/film superimposition is also 170

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Intertransparency Empedocles’ concept of the elements ‘leaping through one another’ is realised in musical and visual terms by intertransparency. In the music, the two pianos are not added one above the other (one pianist playing the lower parts, the other the upper parts) but they are heard through each other, creating various hybridisations, each piano being on a different time line. The same applies to the sections of the work scored for two choirs: each choir exists on a different timeline. The extent to which the timelines are separate varies – at one extreme, the hands of the two pianists are each on a different timeline (Fig. 6), whereas at the other extreme (Fig. 7), the timelines of each piano closely interlock. In the Chorus of Lives (between Acts 2 and 3) each voice in the chorus is on a different timeline (Fig. 8) but by the end of this piece the voices of the two choirs come together on nearly the same timeline (Fig. 9). This range of relationships between timelines means that no two performances of Empedocles will be alike; within certain limits quite a range of differences of harmony, rhythm, melody, and other interactions between the pianists, and between the choirs will emerge, especially because of the ways in which styles, harmony, rhythm and melody are used in the work. These differences relate to the possible variations which exist as a spectrum of gradations between extremes, a concept central to Empedocles’ thought. Dennis Dracup’s visual counterpoint to the music also uses intertransparency in a variety of ways. He projects slides into film and the

INTERTRANSPARENCY AND THE LEAPING ELEMENTS: ROBERT ROBERTSON AND DENNIS DRACUP, EMPEDOCLES (1995)

structurally related to the score, where the music for two pianos hybridises and cross-fertilises, as does the music for the two choirs. Over the next year I had all the music of Empedocles recorded. Periodically I would pass a completed recording of each scene to Dennis so that he could create the visual elements for that scene, very much in the way a choreographer creates dance for pre-existing music. However, there was a key difference from the usual composer/choreographer collaboration: over a period of two years we were able to try out various combinations of film to go with the music and to discuss what visual ideas we felt worked best with the recordings.

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Figure 6. Music with different timelines, Act 1, Scene 4.

slides also cross-fade into each other, and in some sections (Act 3, Scene 3) only cine film is used. So here too is a corresponding range of levels of intertransparency – a range of levels of hybridisation of the visual elements. There is also another range of variation in the visual stream: from at one extreme complete abstraction, to total figuration, with a range of various hybridisations of these elements in between. This range is also there in the music: from its complete abstractions of various styles, to the recognisable styles themselves: a fugue, a Venezuelan/Colombian dance, a Georgian song, a Hebridean hymn. Then there is the range of relationships between the musical and the visual elements. These audiovisual elements interact as they also work on separate timelines in the way that the music itself is intertransparent, as are the visual elements. This audiovisual interaction produces a range

Figure 7. Dance music, Act 2, Scene 1. 172

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of intertransparency between the music and the visual elements, from the synchrony at the beginning and the end of most of the scenes, to the different levels of asynchrony between the music and the visual timelines during the scenes.

INTERTRANSPARENCY AND THE LEAPING ELEMENTS: ROBERT ROBERTSON AND DENNIS DRACUP, EMPEDOCLES (1995)

Figure 8. Chorus of Lives, beginning.

Act 2, Scene 1 Act 2, Scene 1 is an example of an extreme combination of music where the two pianos are closely interlocked in their timelines, and the visual elements are also tightly structured, but the two are asynchronously combined, paradoxically creating total synchrony together with asynchrony, producing what Rimbaud called a ‘d´er`eglement de tous les sens’. 173

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Figure 9. Chorus of Lives, end.

The incident evoked in this scene is one where Empedocles is at a dance during which a young man, excited by a combination of music and wine, becomes possessed and draws a sword. Using his knowledge and experience of trance states, Empedocles calms everything down by effecting an abrupt change in the music. We had no ideas as to how to express this visually – another failure, another problem! Then one day Dennis showed me a film he’d just finished which involved the animation of over 2,000 images of flowers. When he showed me this film I was amazed – ‘Let’s try it with the dance for Act 2, Scene 1!’ I said. We tried it, and it worked, but the film was too short for the music. Later I had an idea – what about extending the flowers film with fruit? Dennis agreed, and shot lots of different kinds of fruit, 174

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which he combined in a syncopated rhythm. So when we combined syncopated music and syncopated film, music and image leapt through one another, in continually interacting and developing audiovisual rhythms, to create a feeling of mounting excitement, possession, then collapse (Fig. 10).

INTERTRANSPARENCY AND THE LEAPING ELEMENTS: ROBERT ROBERTSON AND DENNIS DRACUP, EMPEDOCLES (1995)

Figure 10. Image from Act 2, Scene 1.

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15 Diary of a Music/Film Be satisfied with discovery, and beware of explanation. Georges Braque1

The music/film is a new form, where music and film interact on an overall basis of equality, made by the same artist. The music/film can also result from a close collaboration, as equals, between a composer and a filmmaker. New developments in technology have enabled the development of this new form, which was previously not economically viable for artists working largely on their own. Now it is possible to edit film and assemble music on a computer, and to explore various ways of combining music and film, with relative ease. From its earliest beginnings, film has been an audiovisual art form. Then, because of increasing costs, complexity of production, and the economics of supply and demand, film production became separated into a hierarchy of specialisations. Film (like the string section in a classical orchestra) became dominant, leaving the other elements, like music and sound (the other instruments), to assume a subservient role. Film has become like a style of architecture, with an accepted set of orders, a way of building which is set and adhered to, and where the reasons for the way it is are in danger of being forgotten. Then new technological developments arrive which force architects to re-think and re-consider what was previously unconditionally accepted in the process of building. 177

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An architect comes along who re-designs buildings, re-designs the furniture and fittings inside them, re-thinks the articulation and relationship of this new architectural form to landscape, light, climate and people. This is the way I’d like to consider the music/film: as a new form, with new possibilities of expression and diffusion. And as a way to re-think the past of both music and film, and other forms which combine the visual and the aural on an equal basis: opera, dance, theatre and multimedia.

The music/film: aims In the music/film I am aiming to – create a form where music and film interact on an equal basis overall – compose music which combines the revolutionary musical ideas of the 1950s and 1960s with tonality and modality. For example, composers like Var`ese, John Cage, Xenakis, Ligeti, Penderecki, Lutoslawski and Stockhausen were revolutionary in that they discarded ‘post-and-beam’ tonality and structured sound organically. Half a century earlier, Frank Lloyd Wright caused a similar revolution in architecture by discarding post-and-beam structures and instead using structures based on organic forms. For the past 30 years in my music I have been combining tonality/modality with organic forms – make film which is a direct transcription of the everyday: the capture of unique and unrepeatable moving and still images which are already of interest to the filmmaker and which do not require the addition of special or other complex effects to make the images interesting – use new technology to facilitate the montage of both music and film, and their effective superimposition, as well as their projection and their diffusion worldwide.

Oserake and The River That Walks – How is a music/film made? In 2000 I could not find anywhere in London where I could do postgraduate research in the interaction of music, sound and film. But the 178

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film production staff at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University in Canada were very interested in my proposal, so my wife and I moved to Montreal. As a graduate student in the Film Production Department, I could choose my supervisor for my MFA film project. I chose the film director Professor Marielle Nitoslawska. An experienced documentary film director and cinematographer, she had studied at the Polish National Film School in Lodz. I already knew that I wanted to make a portrait of Montreal in winter, and I was confident that she could provide any advice I might need for this project. Once I had completed the music/film Oserake and The River That Walks (2002), Professor Nitoslawska asked me for a booklet to accompany the work. This request was an opportunity to explore how a music/film is made, and what audiovisual implications arise from this new kind of work, made possible by technological advances in multimedia computing. The texts which follow are an updated version of the original booklet.

A music/film Oserake and The River That Walks is very much a work born of displacement, a result of a real change in habit and mood, of what Eisenstein calls an ‘imbalance in the processing of sense impressions’2 which leads to creative activity as an attempt at resolution. Where is Montreal in relation to London? North, or south? It’s actually far to the south of London – it’s on the same latitude as Venice, Italy. So the light there can be wonderfully clear and sparkling, especially on a sunny day in winter. In the music/film Oserake and The River That Walks I show what happens to Montreal in winter, when for nearly six months the wilderness takes over, an overwhelming force which tries to return this modern city to the time before the human streets and blocks existed. Many citizens seem to fear and loathe this vast force. As they retreat from it, phantoms invade the empty white streets. Massive snowdrifts, huge icicles and icefalls appear, everything is transformed beneath layers of snow, and we glimpse what was seen by the Iroquois 179

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who founded the original settlement, by this great river they called ‘the river that walks’, swept with ice. The music/film is in two parts. The first part, set in contemporary Montreal, moves from the present to increasingly metaphorical spaces, where perception begins to function more and more by association, until this breaks down into abstraction. This audiovisual collapse provides the link to The River That Walks, where historical time disappears and what is left is only the present, in its musical unfolding.

From the spectacular to the everyday An overview of Oserake in progress I don’t really like talking about my films. Everything I want to say is in the film itself; for me to say anything more is, as the proverb goes, like ‘drawing legs on a picture of a snake’. Akira Kurosawa3

Explanations, explanations As an ‘independent’, I have nearly always had to explain my work myself. With this type of explanation runs the danger of over-simplification. For example, with the music/film Oserake, a one-to-one music/ image/sound-to-reason structure could be given, which would omit the intended counterpoint of possibilities, which includes reasons, expressions and ideas which exist beyond my conscious effort. It would also be an attempt to produce in words what I’ve already done in music and film. This would be a superfluous act, and would certainly not work. When asked to explain his film 2001, Stanley Kubrick dismissed any explanation he might give as only being of use to film critics and teachers of film. He applied this approach to all his films. However, as I teach film, I cannot realistically adopt this attitude. I prefer to try to achieve the more relaxed approach David Hockney used when he prepared the commentary for his Tate Gallery retrospective in London, in 1988–89. When you listened to his recording, you felt that he was standing there in the gallery, next to you, informally 180

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telling you about what he’d attempted to do in each painting, and what he was thinking and experiencing at the time. However, there’s another danger which can accompany explanations: de-mystification, the loss of a sense of mystery. This sense of mystery is something I’ve always believed should be a key element in a work. I feel that the loss of a sense of mystery significantly damages the realism, the sense of the everyday in the work. Without it, or when the mysterious element is removed, the work becomes lifeless and twodimensional. The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.4

The physicist and writer Alan Lightman quotes this observation Albert Einstein made, when he discusses the educational films of Charles and Ray Eames. Lightman goes on to ask himself what Einstein meant by the mysterious: I do not think he meant that science is full of unpredictable or supernatural forces. I do not think he meant teleological or even unknowable. I believe he meant a sense of awe, a sense that we do not have all the answers at this very moment, a sense that we can stand at the edge of what is known and unknown and gaze into that vast cavern and be exhilarated rather than frightened.5

And at this point, at the edge of this mystery, full of unanswered questions, Lightman recalls a thought from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: ‘try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.’ Commenting on A Clockwork Orange in 1971, Kubrick referred to ‘something in the human personality which resents things that are clear, and, conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories’.6 In a discussion of Barry Lyndon in 1975, Kubrick said that ‘the most important parts of a film are the mysterious parts – beyond the reach of reason and language’.7 181

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Oserake The original First Nation name for the area on which Montreal now stands is thought to be Oserake. Hochelaga, the presumed original First Nation village (also today the name of a Montreal district) is apparently a derivation of this name. Two possible meanings of the word Oserake have survived: – the place where the beavers gather – the place where you spend the winter. It’s the latter meaning I had in mind when making the music/film. The long crescendo of an approaching underground train, heard in the dark, has for me the quality of forthcoming excitement tinged with anxiety toward the unknown, which exactly expresses my first impressions on arriving in Montreal.8 And the feeling of being thrown into a destination still persists whenever I travel long distance by air. I don’t experience the gradual change of terrain, of light, of temperature, which makes for the easier preparation provided by the slower forms of travel.

Music and the image in Oserake: the role of the glissandi A pizzicato chord for strings articulates the appearance of the first image: downtown Montreal in a blizzard. This image, though full of movement, is at first completely still. Then it is set in motion by the first and largest block of orchestral sound, which is so loud and powerful that it overwhelms the visual image. Paradoxically, this establishes a close link from the start, between music and the moving image. The counterpoint between these two media is maintained at varying levels of relatedness throughout the music/film. The loss of orientation in an environment where one knows very little is expressed in several large orchestral blocks of multiple string glissandi. Each block is a vertical massing of subsequent blocks for strings, which are heard throughout the first section of Oserake. The harmonies I use throughout the music/film are a superimposition of two musical systems: the major/minor, and the modal. This combination produces a firm harmonic direction (characteristic of the 182

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major/minor system), which is partially undermined by the ambiguities of the modal system. However, I use glissandi to undermine more completely the structure and tensions implied in both systems. The glissando has probably one of the most disruptive effects possible (apart from noise) on the clarity of a tonal/modal harmonic progression. It undermines the dominance of the bass line, the foundation on which the tonal/modal harmony is built. A glissando can be considered to be a very large number of notes played as a continuously sliding sound, between two different notes. If elsewhere other notes are present, each transitory note in the glissando will touch on a new relationship with these other notes. If several glissandi appear at once, each one will interact with the other in an unpredictable mix of transitory harmonies, sometimes producing chemistries of overtones which de-stabilise pitches, making them split, coalesce, shake or briefly vibrate. This interaction between overtones creates harmonies which cannot be notated in the original score, as their interaction will produce different harmonies in different acoustic environments. The ear picks up these tensions more clearly due to the tonal/modal nature of the notated harmonies. This score thus lies on the edge of harmony, melody and rhythm, as the beginnings and ends of the glissandi are always temporally separate, creating shadows of tonal/modal melodic and rhythmic forms. My intention here was to leave behind the limitations of notationbased music theory, with its overwhelming baggage of Western classical music, to enter a musical space where our perceptions of sound, interacting with its volatile physical nature, are used as a means of expression, half way between order and chaos. This chaotic aspect surfaced in the studio where we recorded the music. The experienced musicians found at some point that the glissandi were beginning to undermine their sense of pitch, essential in the tonal/modal context of the music. The cellist pointed out that glissandi also have a disruptive effect on the performer’s sense of time. For example, in a long glissando, the musician can find it very difficult to gauge the rate of change of pitch necessary to maintain an even slide from one pitch to the other. The concentration on avoiding uneven movement can take away the performer’s concentration on the correct

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length of the glissando. The range and duration of a glissando also have a strong effect on the listener’s perception of time passing. In addition to these disruptive factors, it is still not clear today where our perception of these sounds begins and where the measurable nature of these acoustic phenomena ends. This is an ambiguous musical space which parallels the ambiguities of some of the visual spaces and games with abstraction in the film part of Oserake.

Music and the image: silence and timing The blocks of music have a more or less fixed temporal structure – each one lasts about five seconds. And each block has a different instrumentation, something not economically feasible outside the recording studio. The timing of these blocks is determined by the variability of the lengths of the silences between each one. In this way the blocks tie in various sometimes unforeseeable connections between different images in the film. This is possible because of the floating and ambiguous nature of the harmonies and the glissandi, as well as by the residual but still strong sense of anticipation which remains from block to block, from chord to chord, because of their tonal and modal character. This narrative-like tension parallels the tension in the sequence of images, prompted by our curiosity as to what will appear next in the film.

The introduction Images of a blizzard in downtown Montreal dominate this introductory section. Various ideas are presented, ideas which are further developed in later sections: – The way in which twentieth-century buildings are transformed by the extreme weather, when for example snow in its finest powdered form, ‘snow-smoke’, pours and whirls off flat roofs, and it spirals along walkways, an invasion of chaotic wilderness amongst highly ordered forms. – A twentieth-century stylised statue of a naked woman,9 an abstraction of curves without individuality (there’s no head), is 184

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the first of a series of actual and virtual sculptures in Oserake, all of them residues of a human presence which varies in individuality. This idea is heightened by the way the effects of winter contribute to hiding human presence. There’s also a paradoxical link between human anatomical curves and curves born of the interaction of wind and snow. – The fleeting and suddenly disappearing presence of the human being in the context of a wilderness which is far more ancient than human existence. Its powerful energy is more permanent than any transitory human energy. Only in the introduction is anyone clearly seen, followed by an instant disappearance. – The motif of the spiral, a characteristic of natural turbulence, which occurs throughout the film in various forms. – The contradictory motif of the palm tree, reflecting a human yearning for an opposite state. On another level, this and related images reflect Montreal’s history as an international port. These two ideas are not unrelated.

The end of the introduction The introduction concludes with the bas-relief of a First Nation chief ’s head, used as a motif at the start of Associated Screen News documentaries. Here this image is seen behind the screen of a snowstorm, which leads to the following image of an empty railroad station terminal covered with snow. The links between these two images are threefold: 1. The bas-relief is an image of a people who no longer exist in everyday life in the form depicted. This image cannot exist unless it relates to a semi-mythical reality, an idealised image which still survives for many of the descendants of the settlers from Europe, some of whose ancestors actually had family ties with the various First Nation peoples who lived in this landscape before them. 2. The railroad terminal almost disappears under the winter wilderness, so it’s not hard to imagine what this landscape was like in winters before the first Europeans arrived, what a First Nation chief would have seen here at this season. 3. The combination of ideas (1) and (2) implies that the immeasurably ancient, though only a remnant, can become stronger than 185

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the recent contemporary, which is itself a remnant in the vast all-encompassing wilderness. The view from the rail terminal is outward bound, suggesting the beginning of a possible journey, even though the snow-covered tracks are hardly visible. This objective documentary-like image (following the symbol associated with documentaries) is subverted by the only zoom shots in the film which complete the introduction. These subjective zooms link the wilderness outside my study window with the reassuring personal clutter on the table where the music/film Oserake is being composed and edited. The clutter on the desk is paralleled with the chaos outside; the snow and ice come right onto the window just in front of the desk. The edges of the music manuscript evoke the parabolic curves of the wilderness, two very different things brought together by the ambient illumination from the diffused light on the snow.

A historical perspective Next appear a set of 14 images. All of these are various types of sculptures: – bas-reliefs, both intentional (an image of a transatlantic liner covered with snow) and found (the outline of a demolished house on a party wall) – sculptures, in the form of statues – found objects (a snow-covered executive chair, plants wrapped in sackcloth) – large found object ‘installations’ (a hotel sign, an advertisement hoarding, a boat covered in snow) These images reflect a chronology of Montreal’s colonial history: – mysterious monk-like figures evoke the key role of Christians in the colonisation process; they also suggest a solitary family trudging through snow (Fig. 11). One image shows these figures in front of mock-Gothic sculptures of dragons – the fur trader McGill is seen striding knee-deep in snow – his snow-laden coat tails resemble white furs (Fig. 12) 186

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Figure 11. A solitary family.

Figure 12. The fur trader James McGill.

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Figure 13. The snow-boat.

– another pioneer, the founder of the port of Montreal, stands proudly on a pedestal, backed by a row of gigantic silos, which once stored thousands of tons of grain from the prairies. The pioneer’s arms cradle several inches of snow – a bas-relief of a transatlantic liner, with its superstructure hidden under snow, and a tugboat which has been frozen into the harbour (Fig. 13).

Images of the recent past involve relaxation (a twentieth-century reclining figure), entertainment (a hotel sign), which both show the effect of winter. This season also has an impact on business (the executive chair, and the giant milk bottle, with its half-illegible inscription). The strange outline of a special services soldier at the top of a fire escape leads to an image in a lighter vein, an otherwise completely blank white-as-snow hoarding with the printed words Joyeux party at the lower edge. This bilingual message concludes the historical perspective section. 188

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The sheer scale of winter in Montreal has made a strong impression on me. Having previously lived in places where snow appears then disappears after a short while, I was totally unprepared for the gradual but relentless superimposition of fall after fall of snow. The huge accumulations of it that are formed represent a combination of nature and human effort on a massive scale, costing millions of dollars each winter to manage. This involves pushing and pulling on an ancient Egyptian scale, and it’s with the incongruous sight of pharaonic motifs on a mock-Egyptian fac¸ade, superimposed by a screen of falling snowflakes (like the First Nation chief earlier) that I start this section about the gigantism of Montreal’s winters. After a series of images where skyscrapers seem almost buried in huge snow-mounds, the section ends with the receding orthogonals of a hieratic Egyptian-like corporate space. The extreme contrasts of black and white are a moment of equilibrium in the progression from dark to light in the first part of Oserake.

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Pharaonic scale

Abstractions This is a transitional section, acting as a bridge between images from previous sections, which were readily recognisable, to images that are more demanding on our powers of perception and interpretation. This is a move from the occasionally claustrophobic, alienating and overwhelming public winter spaces, to a more personal exploration of certain details of winter. These details open up unexpected spaces, which are created by the increasing exercise of the viewers’ imagination. This is a process involving abstraction: the images become flatter; they lose a clarity of scale and become ambiguous. The interaction of snow and wind in a corner begins to suggest a much larger, mountainside scale. A winter landscape viewed from inside a large dark space appears flattened, a picture of the wilderness which seems to adhere to the glass of the window. The spirals of the snow-smoke from the introduction become frozen into superimposed spirals of a typical Montreal fire escape. Though fixed, these spirals in their extreme black and white contrasts create an optical illusion of slowly radiating movement. 189

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This black on white structure is reversed in the final image, which is probably indecipherable in its abstraction. These are icicles at night lit up by a street light.

Olympic dimensions On my first visit to the Olympic complex I was very tempted to film it in a touristic way. The leaning tower’s outdoor lift provides a great opportunity for a crane shot of epic proportions. In fact the epic scale of the complex is what struck me first, along with its colossal Eero Saarinen-type curves. Then I thought that these gigantic curves, and the vertiginous perspectives they make, could be interesting in a winter context. When I returned I found that the complex’s snow-covered spaces had become more ambiguous, more abstract, totally integrated with the effects of winter weather. It was almost as if the architect Roger Taillibert had played a design game with winter. The curves of the Biodome and the Leaning Tower seem to be extensions of the curves of drifting snow. Snow-smoke moves along and off these curves with a grace and elegance not present in the violent interactions it has with the right-angled buildings seen in the introduction. Huge icefalls look quite natural, pouring off the vast stylised guttering channels curving down the concrete structures. The Biodome roof, with its immense slow curve, looks like a hill in the winter wilderness. Some of the spaces in the complex become almost complete abstractions of curved lines and shadows. Others switch momentarily from an abstract dimension into ambiguous symbolic shapes. Is that a reptilian eye which stares at us? Is this some sort of dragon in the snow? Are these the huge oblique lines of the krill strainers in the jaws of a whale? Is that a mask? This oneiric space, subject to multiple transformations, even affects the normally vertical directional signs, which lean at strange angles in sympathy with an architecture where the space-creating orthogonal is absent. When editing this section I had to make sketches of what I’d filmed, in order not to get lost in these ambiguous spaces (Fig. 14).

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Figure 14. Montage sketches for the Olympic section.

These ambiguous spaces bring to mind Antonin Artaud’s experiences in the Sierra Tarahumara, which he describes in ‘The Mountain of Signs’, in his account From a Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumaras. In this text he gives detailed descriptions of the forms he recognises in the Sierra, forms born of rock formations interacting with ‘a deliberate play of light, superimposed on the varied surfaces of the rocks’, making games of light and shadow. 191

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Now, this Sierra which is inhabited by and which breathes a metaphysical thought in its rock formations, has been sowed with signs by the Tarahumaras, signs which are perfectly conscious, intelligent and consistent.10

Artaud goes on to explain how the Tarahumaras, aware of these ‘signs’, have added their own to this landscape:

In winter this Olympic space has something of this shared human and natural conspiracy to create supposedly accidental images and signs.

The snow-covered Christmas tree An attractive and frequent sight on winter nights is the outdoor Christmas tree, covered with multi-coloured electric lights. These symbols are so familiar that they rarely get a second look. They are part of the outdoor furniture of Christmas festivities, something we grow up with. However, on a Christmas night walk, I couldn’t help noticing the strange appearance these decorated trees take on after a heavy fall of snow. Peering into one particular tree, I found that all sorts of unexpected images emerged. Many more of these appeared when I was editing this section on the computer: the head of a black panther, a baby’s head nearby, an ecstatic face of a woman, an ice cavern, a mask, a reclining female nude, a dog’s head in the dark (Fig. 15). All these images were unintentionally created by the person who placed the lights on the tree. The magical interaction between the illuminations and the subsequent thick layer of snow could not have been foreseen. The oneiric space is a very personal space. It’s the imaginative space of the Rorschach blot, of tea leaves left in a cup. Consequently these forms, which exist on the edge of ambiguity and formlessness, may be differently interpreted by others. This is a mysterious polymorphous space which demands interpretation, of signs which provoke deciphering, and which may evoke startlingly different images.

Frost pictures Here shapes are laid out in patterns of light against light, as opposed to the previous section, where shapes loomed out of the enveloping dark. 192

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Figure 15. The head of a black panther.

It was at night that I first became aware of these pictures of frost. I noticed a spectacular example in Moscow one evening, and I was able to pause for long enough to film it for Invisible City. The other occasion was on a bus in St Petersburg, then Leningrad, near the Yusupov Palace. It was at night, after a recent snowfall. On the windows of the crowded unheated bus the combined breaths of the passengers had made images (lit up by the yellow streetlights outside) of giant ferns in gold. When I found a series of similar images in Montreal, I noticed that there was much less ambiguity in their interpretation than in the Christmas tree images. Most frequently these mysterious images in frost suggest plant life: a great variety of trees, ferns and grasses, often tropical in their luxuriance, with large generous leaves and sprays of branches curving out in all directions (Fig. 16). Though all these images are literally flat, the repetition of certain patterns suggests dense forests, scrubland, and tremendously fertile tropical gardens, with the type of perspectives found in Chinese landscape prints. Other pictures in frost imply perspectives seen from the air, directly over desert mountain ranges, where any luxuriance is purely geological. 193

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Figure 16. Images in frost suggest plant life.

Strangely, few of these frost pictures evoke winter subjects, but mostly landscapes of heat. This paradox further develops the palm trees and Egyptian motifs in Oserake. Some of the repetitive designs suggest pictures of pictures, like floral wallpaper. When these crowd together they suggest flocks of birds taking off; these are followed by aerial shots of wilderness, which is how this section ends.

Snowstudies This is a gradual transition to The River That Walks, the second part of Oserake. From a study of imaginary wildernesses in the frost pictures, we move to structures with no perceptible human presence at all: these are studies of a variety of branches and plant stems which interact with snow in different ways, in what appears to be an unfettered wild state – mostly filmed in downtown Montreal. When I saw the images which begin this section, I understood how the large, almost monochrome abstractions painted by Jackson Pollock 194

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are close to the chaotic appearance of undergrowth in the harsh North American winter. Here I take this idea of abstraction and use it to move from vigorous plant growth to a more fragile evidence of it, until a delicate but resistant trembling stem gives way to a distillation of shapes involving only shadow and light on snow. A study of long edges of snowdrifts yields images of sand dunes, or the complex curves of the human body. The mechanism of our perception insists on interpreting even the faintest and most abstract lines, at the expense of the accuracy of scale. To effect a smooth transition to the very different scale of The River That Walks, I move from showing snow falling on snow, to an image without scale, without depth: the empty space of virgin snow. After passing through the play of black and white, of multitudinous varieties of grey, this image, which isn’t one really, lies at the opposite end to the opening of Oserake, which was in total darkness. A slightly, barely distinguishably different whiteness leads us to the snow-beach by The River That Walks.

Some context Placing Oserake in the context of my past work, I realise that my operas always dealt with the presentation of extreme and extraordinary situations. For example, in the climax of Act 1 of The Kingdom, a revolutionary leader signals through the flames as he is being burned at the stake. I remember thinking how this same act had been described by Artaud in his Le th´eaˆ tre et son double. And yet this was a historical event, like the one shown at the end of The Cathars, where a procession of men, women and children sing a Cathar hymn as they climb into the flames of a gigantic stake, in counterpoint to a group of monks singing a Catholic hymn, to exhort them to repent and abjure their heresy. Even in the dance opera Empedocles, in the last act, we see the four deaths of the philosopher, concluding with his suicide on Etna. My first encounter with filmmaking was the collaboration on the film for the music/film version of Empedocles. When I came to work with film myself, for the music/film-in-progress Invisible City, I began to realise that this medium was pulling me in a completely different 195

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direction: from the presentation of historical or semi-mythical extreme situations, to showing the everyday. For example Invisible City shows everyday events, objects and atmospheres which have become invisible through habit and daily cares: a pig’s head hanging at a butcher, with a cigar in its mouth; a frost ‘picture’; extreme neon displays.

The River That Walks and the everyday After much research, Claudette found the pre-Christian name of the St Lawrence River: ‘The River That Walks’. I was curious to know how this river was seen in a non-Christian way, to get a feeling of how it was perceived before the Europeans arrived. Montreal is unusual in that the river is at some distance to the city’s heart. Normally a river is the original artery that runs through a city. This means that many Montrealers aren’t really aware of the river, as it doesn’t have a place in their daily lives. Yet its existence and its multiple transformations in winter are as much a part of the everyday as the daily commute to work. Many citizens of this city will probably travel vast distances to see extraordinary sights in faraway places, without really being aware that nearby something extraordinary happens every winter, on each ordinary day (Fig. 17). This phenomenon is characteristic of current Western culture. Ideal life is presented as a fulfilled and happy immersion in ‘24/7’ in the company one owns or is owned by: ‘He worked seven days a week, 12 or 15 hours a day, and went without a vacation for the next 10 years.’11 These demands demand escape, a retreat to places which require a 24/7 income to reach, places where you join all the others who are escaping their corporate demands, places which are almost as far removed from the actual everyday as the office.

All-over space The stop/start rhythms of the first part of Oserake, with contrasts of various kinds of still and moving images, are resolved in the continuous sweeping movements of The River That Walks. 196

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Figure 17. Something extraordinary happens every winter.

For this sense of a continuous, as well as an interrupted space, I was drawn to the all-over spaces of North American artists like Stuart Davis, David Smith and Ad Reinhardt.12 Reinhardt, particularly in his late ‘black’ paintings, was very useful in helping me to realise the structure of the music for The River That Walks. In film terms, the river section takes one subject which gathers the previously shown sensory ideas together, in a study of continuous movement. Shadow, opacity, translucence, darkness, reflection, depth, flatness, transparency, loss of scale, spiral motion, geometrical forms, fragmentation, chaotic motion, and various types of turbulence all appear abstracted at a different level. They are combined in a single-subject release of energy.

Music in The River That Walks The innate continuous tones of the church organ, as well as its implied large scale, had the sense of flow I needed, to counterpoint it with the continuous flow of the river. The use of several church organs on 197

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various levels of superimposition is a continuation of the idea of the variable string orchestration in the first part of Oserake. It also adds to the sense of the large scale of what is happening to the river, and its occasional suggestions of an immeasurably greater scale. The overlapping fragments of ice, of shots of ice floes, are paralleled in the continuously overlapping harmonies in the multiple organ score, which functions in an analogous way to the overlaps and resulting translucence in Reinhardt’s ‘black’ paintings, which play with a similar loss of scale and loss of boundaries. The organ harmonies (a continuation of the harmonies used for the strings) are articulated by the unique registral variations available on a church organ. The complex harmonics in the various combinations of organ stops used for each chord are analogous to the registral ambiguities of Reinhardt’s ‘black’ tones, which, through the overlapping of very dark tones, create complex variations on green, blue, red, orange and so on. In these paintings there are two temporally separated levels of perception: – the initial all-over impression of shades of ‘black’; then – the journey into the painting, which reveals the colours and their interactions by the superimpositions of their various shades. The music gives an initial impression of a church organ, but then the harmonies evoke abstractions of the sounds of various machines: the grinding engines of snow trucks, snow ploughs, the sounds of factory whistles, train bells and horns, and turbines of various kinds. In addition, the overlapping of these harmonies, with the chemistry of partials which results from the interactions of the varied organ registers, produces other harmonies which don’t exist in the notated score. These are analogous to the shades in Reinhardt’s paintings, where he plays with both the edges of pigment and the edges of our perception. The effect of ambient light and shade on a painting can be compared to the effect of the acoustics of a performance space on harmonics and other elements of musical performance. The visual evidence of human presence which was there in the first part of Oserake disappears completely in the river section, and, with it, any sense of time other than the present.

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Otherwise the human is only there, at one remove, in the machine sounds suggested by the music for six organs. The film and the music in Oserake can be presented as separate works. However, it’s their interaction which produces a space which is a combination of the senses with ideas of the chaotic and the ordered, a space which goes beyond the limitations of each medium on its own. Recently I came across some ideas Stanley Kubrick expressed in a rare interview, ideas which are related to what I am attempting to do (on a much smaller scale) in Oserake: 2001 . . . is basically a visual, nonverbal experience. It avoids intellectual verbalization and reaches the viewer’s subconscious in a way that is essentially poetic and philosophic. The film thus becomes a subjective experience which hits the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does, or painting. Actually, film operates on a level much closer to music and to painting than to the printed word, and, of course, movies present the opportunity to convey complex concepts and abstractions without the traditional reliance on words. I think that 2001, like music, succeeds in shortcircuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience and is able to cut directly through to areas of emotional comprehension.13

Facture Once I saw the elderly British painter Francis Bacon in a street in Soho, talking vigorously to Jeffrey Bernard, a journalist friend. They had just emerged from their ‘local’ pub. On television I’d seen Bacon interviewed over lunch in Soho. Here was the same youthful energy and vigour, dispensed over empty bottles worthy of a still life by Morandi. At the last major retrospective of Bacon’s work at the Tate Gallery in London, I was surprised at the effect of a recent version of his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. The original picture, from 1944, has a visceral impact which makes it unforgettable. However, the critics had greatly admired the new 1988 version, so I was prepared to be astonished by it. Immaculate in its gold 199

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frame, it resembled a braided doorman for a five-star hotel. It really was a work which was comfortable on the walls of an international institution, living up to the official status of a grand retrospective. Gone was the raw tearing energy of the original. It was the work of a completely sober artist, showing an uncharacteristic loss of energy, which results in pomposity. I so much preferred the Bacon I’d seen in the Soho street, and over a well-fuelled lunch, someone who had retained the energy of much earlier years. This is why, when thinking about the facture of Oserake, I decided that I wanted a raw look to the images, one which would allow more room for ambiguity. I didn’t need the type of visual clarity which represents an ideal for some artists, like Kubrick. He was so concerned with sharpness of focus that he designed an extreme form of the ‘harp test’ to determine the focus characteristics of a lens for each inch, for 15 feet from the lens.14 I often found myself filming through dirty windows, through insect netting, and through screens of more or less dense blizzards, and even a combination of these. Sometimes, under problematic light, for example the glare of virgin snow, the automated iris stopped itself right down to produce quite grainy textures. These textures have been very useful, as they are similar to the effect of falling snow. I wanted to work with the difficult conditions, rather than against them. I wanted the unexpected: snowflakes which land on the lens, the sudden gusts and the strong winds which shake the camera. I wanted these to be an expressive part of the work. Emil Nolde once described painting tiny watercolour landscapes outside in winter: the cold temperatures would freeze the paint on the paper, creating patterns he would incorporate into the painting. He considered these unforeseeable interventions as nature’s collaboration in his work, not as something to fight against. I also had to deal with occasional rapid transformations in the ambient light. This can be considered a problem in 35 mm filmmaking, as changes in light can result in changes of focus – Kubrick liked to continue filming whether the sun was behind clouds or not, so he used a 35 mm camera with an easily adjustable control of aperture.15 This type of camera would not have given me the mobility I needed: the ability to load film cartridges rapidly enabled me to catch extremely transitory images, before they disappeared altogether. These factors

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have contributed to the sometimes flickering screen, the shaky camera, the lack of clarity. The appalling conditions in which Rossellini made Rome, Open City are apparent in the way the film looks, with its unequal light and general evidence of a struggle, closely related to what the film is about. Yet Rome, Open City would not have had the same impact if Rossellini had had access to the equipment and film stock that Kubrick had at his disposal. Each work derives its effectiveness as much from its facture as its content. Facture has no real equivalent in English. ‘Production values’ is an inadequate term in this context, as the facture of the work is often determined by the conditions in which it is made, conditions both good and bad: Nolde would never have had nature’s collaboration if at this time in the 1940s he’d been making large and sumptuous paintings in oils.

The flickering landscape In a note placed by Strindberg before the text of his A Dream Play, he describes how he sees this unusual work: Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable . . . the imagination spins, weaving new patterns; a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, incongruities and improvisations. The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, assemble. But one consciousness rules over them all, that of the dreamer; for him there are no secrets, no illogicalities, no scruples, no laws. He neither acquits nor condemns, but merely relates . . . this flickering tale.16

The production history of A Dream Play suggests that it’s a work which is most effective in an intimate setting, along the lines of the magic lantern shows which had so fascinated Strindberg. His description suggests very much the type of film I had in mind when making Oserake, substituting the word ‘images’ for ‘characters’. At the same time this approach does not preclude the everyday, in fact it is driven by it. Rilke writes in his Ninth Duino Elegy that perhaps we are only here to say the names of things like ‘house’, ‘bridge’, ‘gate’, ‘window’, ‘tree’, but to say them in such a way that 201

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these everyday things never themselves might imagine that they are so intensely present. This is how the spirit of a place is born.

Audiovisual montage: music, sound and image in Oserake and The River That Walks Silence and white In the music for Oserake silence begins between the blocks for strings, then progresses by entering the blocks themselves, as the combinations of glissandi become more and more transparent. In The River That Walks, these blocks have become continuous sound, through their orchestration for six organs. The silences are there between the chords, and they have also been absorbed into the blocks themselves, in the spacings of the vertical arrangement of pitches in each chord. For Oserake I chose to compose the music for strings, as this kind of instrument is capable of articulating a large number of different glissandi in any register. For The River That Walks I composed the music for church organs, as I wanted a continuously changing flow of sound to unfold in counterpoint to the continuous flows of ice. I could have orchestrated these blocks for strings, but I wanted sounds that are more implacable and at times physical in their effect on the body. The church organs, with their powerful 36-foot bass notes which create vibrations you can feel, most closely expressed the power of the inexorable flows of ice, and the physicality of filming in temperatures as low as minus 38 degrees centigrade. In the images, silence is paralleled in the white – the white wilderness opens up the city. As the images of Oserake unfold, so the silences between each block expand. Editing a film like this is about editing the perception, the apprehension of images. The length an image remains on the screen is key to its comprehension. The mind’s eye holds on to the mysterious lit-up Christmas tree snow-caverns, as it can’t comprehend them. The eye and mind are attracted to that which isn’t understood at first, and which may never be understood.

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Error and mystery are related. But is it really error? Or ambiguity? Or misapprehension? The eye and mind (and the ear and mind) aren’t necessarily attracted to the immediately comprehensible or the instantly accessible. In Oserake there is a progression from a kinetic image to an image which demands to be appreciated in stillness; movement of the subject within the frame gradually develops until the sequence which shows the snow curves. These curves are still, but movement is there, as the camera moves to follow their unravelling progress. This progression is what links the cinematic image to the landscape painting tradition. Moving images are looked at in a completely different way to static images. As Oserake moves towards white, it progresses towards silence. The sensual snow curves demand time to be made legible, as they’re barely visible in the whiteness of the snow, until the moving image and the still image are no longer different, as both have become evenly white. There’s no movement any more, no sound, just silence: white and nothingness. In terms of perception, the darker images parallel this phenomenon. With increasing darkness movement also becomes harder to perceive. ‘Black-out’ and ‘white-out’: the extremes meet perceptually in terms of the invisible. Oserake is also a film about how we understand, apprehend, perceive images with the eye and mind. It’s also about how we perceive sound and make sense of it. And how we perceive silence and make sense of it The harmonic changes are more noticeable in the music for The River That Walks because of the way silence is contrapuntally interwoven in the chord progressions. These are windows of silence through which chords are heard. Otherwise all sound would become opaque. In the same way the moving ice floes are articulated in shape by the dark of the river beneath. In Oserake the explosive energy of the beginning gradually unwinds as relatively still images increasingly appear, the silences become longer, and the blocks become reduced, from hundreds of strings to just a few instruments, as the images eventually are dissolved in white.

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In this way the music and the visual elements are related, and united, by a structure which is common to both. This structure needs to be in the form of an abstract formal structure, a sort of skeleton, that works equally well for a visual medium as for an aural medium. Like a skeleton it is invisible, but it is perceptually felt, because it operates in time. It’s a skeletal structure which is in counterpoint to the body of the music and film – it doesn’t share but it sustains the detailed characteristic overall curves of the work. In Oserake there’s a progression from the concrete to the abstract, or, more precisely, from human-designed forms interacting with nature to forms more totally natural, which then open out into purely imaginary spaces, by suggesting other natural forms altogether. Oserake moves from figurative images to greater and greater abstraction. (This is more evident than the dark to light structure.) The River That Walks: the acoustic interference patterns in the music for six organs are at their strongest when the ice fragments surge up from the dark depths of the river. These ice movements become chaotic, as the hitherto consistent flowing patterns across the screen are violently disrupted by a new turbulence rising up at us from the depths. In The River That Walks straight cuts keep the pace going, highlighting a complex interweaving of the ice floes, moving at different speeds and in varying directions.

The wilderness of the imagination This is a positive idea.17 The wilderness in its ever-changing forms, producing a sense of continuing wonder and dynamic thought, a two-way electrical connection between the mind-body and the landscape. Take some different types of snow and ice, and their effects, as an example of ever-changing forms: – ‘insect’ snow: looks like white bugs flying in almost Brownian motion – very large snowflakes, creating fragile but huge layers of snow on tree branches and even layers on wires and against thin stems – prismatic snow: millions of points of silver or gold scattered in the air in the sunlight 204

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– sleet or wet snow – freezing rain covering every surface with ice. Necks of bottles lie everywhere in the snow. Tiny clicking sounds emerge from trees and bushes. These broken necks of bottles are actually tubes of ice which the wind has broken off the branches – freezing fog or mist, transforming trees into dendrites of frost. The city in winter changes every day. Each time you go out in the morning the city is different: – – – –

the type of snow is different a new ice overhang has been sculpted by the wind new icicles have formed something else has appeared or disappeared or changed shape, because of the increasing quantities of snow or ice, or both.

The city itself travels in the winter. Each day it becomes a slightly different, sometimes a very different place. The trees change more than they do in any other season. With each different type of snowfall or frost they take on a new appearance. Compare the look of a heavily snow-laden tree with the same tree after freezing fog. The more you penetrate the city in winter, the more it gradually opens out into countless variations of mental space. This happens partly because of disjunctions in proportion. Our sense of scale suddenly disappears. Looking at a swirling of snow-smoke induces images of blizzards high up on a mountainside. Large windows of frost take on the appearance of landscapes – like desert mountain ranges or river deltas seen from 30,000 feet up, the paradox of images of tropical vegetation in a profusion of huge curving leaves of ice. So the city doesn’t narrow down or close during winter, but instead opens onto endless varieties of thought and imagination: evocations of deserts, mountains, rivers, coastlines, lakes, plant life of all types, cities both animal and human. The dynamic, fertile and chaotic wilderness enters the city from its normal place far outside, creates a fertility and dynamism of thought, a sense of wonder at its variety, an awe which lies at the source and origin of creativity, the dynamic opposite of the received notion of the freezing up of the imagination and the closing down of life in the winter. 205

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Montage is something which begins to happen Montage18 is something which begins to happen even before I start to film. For some sections of the work I have visual montage ideas before I shoot, along with an idea of what I want to shoot, though what actually happens often goes beyond what I expected, which can be a good sign. Then another montage stage happens in the camera when I’m shooting, especially when things are going well. Something starts to happen whereby I don’t consciously know what’s going on. There’s a tremendous sense of excitement, which is mixed with some anxiety in case what I had hoped to capture doesn’t match my expectations. When I get to the last film montage stage, I keep in mind my first ideas, reject the failed attempts at shooting something I wanted, reject the shots which just don’t seem to fit into the work as a whole, and keep the rhythm of the in-camera editing patterns when the shooting was going really well. I begin to notice relationships between images (and consequently ideas) I hadn’t noticed before, and use these discoveries to extend and enrich the initial ideas which prompted me to make the film in the first place. In assembling the images and shots, I work by contrast, by assembling variants, by making use of structures which evoke shadows of stories, possibly histories, and by playing with the ambiguity or relative directness of an image or set of images. Then I combine the main sections of the film and finally decide on their order. By this visual montage stage, I have usually already composed, rehearsed, recorded and assembled the music. Most of my audiovisual ideas were there before shooting the film, so now I combine my music with the edited film, by finding what I call the ‘audiovisual zero point’, the unique point at which the music, sound and the visual elements each derive an extra energy from their combination.

A note on silence Music and sound have been used with film since the late 1920s. Previously, ‘silent’ cinema used music as a continuous accompaniment. 206

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So it’s not surprising that relatively few films make use of silence as an expressive means. More recently, the generalised use of mobile listening devices has produced an almost total lack of silence in everyday life – even the more subtle everyday sounds from our daily environment are largely obliterated. This phenomenon has maintained an approach to cinema that produces films to which a continuous layer of music and sound is attached. This is a variant of the use of nineteenth-century-style orchestral music as a continuous accompaniment to a film, which itself was a legacy of the audiovisual techniques composers used in traditional nineteenth-century European opera. But some filmmakers like Fritz Lang and Stanley Kubrick were aware of the powerful expressive possibilities of silence in film. Lang’s first sound film M (1931) is a good example of his effective use of silence. The techniques he used for sound in this film were taken up by other filmmakers, to the extent that these methods have become part of the basic ‘grammar’ of the sound film’s expressive means. So why was Lang’s use of silence largely ignored? Over 30 years later, in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick uses total silence in a very expressive way. His use of it in this futuristic film relates to the fact that sound cannot be heard in airless space. However, there is a Spanish filmmaker, who in his youth had studied the violin and who also composed. His plans to study composition at the Schola Cantorum in Paris came to nothing when his father refused to support his ambition to become a composer. This filmmaker was unusual in that he had specific ideas about the use of music, and silence, in cinema. In an interview, the French writer on cinema Andr´e Bazin asked him about his ideas on music in cinema, specifically with respect to his documentary Las Hurdes – Land Without Bread (1933).19 Luis Bu˜nuel replied by telling Bazin about what had happened to him at a meeting of the Association of Documentary Film Producers he had attended in New York. This meeting was attended by the most famous American composers of film music. After a screening of Las Hurdes, one of these composers, who was very enthusiastic about the use of music in this documentary, had asked Bu˜nuel how he’d had

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the marvellous idea of using Brahms’ orchestral music for it. Bu˜nuel replied that he had used Brahms’ Fourth Symphony simply because the ‘general feeling’ of his film had seemed to him to correspond with this particular music by Brahms. It was a simple decision, but he felt that often people are shocked by how effective a simple decision can be, as they are always expecting that the secret of successful creativity lies buried in elaborate complexity. Then Bu˜nuel goes on to say that he doesn’t like film music, as he feels that it is a ‘false element, a sort of trick’. But in some cases he does allow that it has a role. All in all, he would prefer silence: he can imagine that it could be possible for worldwide cinema production to actually suppress music in films most of the time. ‘Ah, silence! That is the important thing!’ he concludes.

Foreground and background Foreground and background are words which cover multitudes of meanings and associations. Various cultures place elements in the foreground, which other cultures would place in the background, for example: ‘we own the land’, versus ‘the land owns us’. Euro-American cultures tend to opt for the former concept, whereas First Nation cultures tend to favour the latter. The change from the first to the second approach produces a complete range of conceptual consequences, which in turn deal with almost every aspect of our daily lives. A reversal such as this, from background to foreground, can have this extensive conceptual effect. And certain ways of working with music and film can also have this impact. In Oserake and The River That Walks I foreground elements which are normally placed in the background in films. The ice floes in The River That Walks have featured in previous films, for example in the background of a documentary or a fiction film. Occasionally they are almost foregrounded, as in the documentary The Viking, directed by George Melford in 1931. 208

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In The River That Walks I also foreground the music. In cinema, music is often called a ‘soundtrack’ and ‘film music’. Both soundtrack and film music function as a ‘backing’, a background or ‘underscore’ to the foreground of the film: they are the aural background to the visual foreground. But in The River That Walks both music and film are placed in the foreground: they interact on an equal level. In Oserake, the music is only sometimes foregrounded; for example at the beginning I use it to overwhelm the image. And a relatively long period of sound on its own, in the dark, precedes the appearance of the film’s first images. In Oserake there is a counterpoint where the visual apparently dominates. However, because of the way I have distributed the appearances of the music in the audiovisual space, the images tend towards stimulating in us a synaesthetic response. As we expect the return of the music, the visual images oblige our audiovisual needs in the meantime, and supply our senses with a sort of synaesthetic ‘music’. What is placed in the foreground and what is put in the background have an effect on our perception of time. As a result, time can be understood not so much as a linear entity, but more as something spatial; it becomes like something under the microscope. We can experience it at different levels of magnification. In turn, this experience changes our notion of foreground and background. Perhaps foreground and background are not viable concepts. They rely on a way of seeing/hearing, perceiving, which artificially prioritises one element over another. This is why much of what is seen and heard in Oserake and The River That Walks usually lies dormant in the background of documentaries and fiction films. A way out of this foreground/background duality may be to consider visual and aural elements as a continuum: a continuum which can be perceived at various levels of magnification, sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously – as an interaction of various audiovisual elements, which vary from a state of relatively little audiovisual interaction to a state of equality of audiovisual interaction. This way of approaching the interaction of music/sound and the visual in a film would be a means to overcome the simple and misleading duality of foreground and background.

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Figure 18. Audiovisual interaction.

This concept of an audiovisual continuum can completely change our approach to time. Because more than one type of time is there: the varieties of pace in cinematic time, and the corresponding varieties of tempo in music. A fast cinematic pace combined with a slow music tempo produces a different perception of time from either element on its own, or when they are combined in an opposite way – a fast music tempo with a slow cinematic pace. The various combinations represent multitudinous levels of time. And for each level of time there is an audiovisual continuum (Fig. 18). So time not only exists at different speeds, but it is also something which exists simultaneously, having all possible speeds and characteristics at once. The idea of a temporal microscope can give us a sense of parts of it. The lenses used give us a range of magnifications of time. And it’s only on the biggest possible scale we can experience, that we can get a sense of the almost unlimited range of temporal simultaneities, and also get a sense of the limitations of the concept of foreground/background duality. When we look at the spectacle provided by a clear sky at night, we don’t only see something which represents the instant of our seeing. We see, simultaneously, a complete spectrum of different epochs. We have, all at once, a visual impression of what happened millions of years ago, and of unnumbered instances since, right up to the ‘shooting star’ which has just burned up in our atmosphere a second ago. This is really the only point where we can see several ‘magnifications’ of time, all at once, in the instant of our seeing.

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Here the concepts of foreground and background of time and of space become completely interchangeable. Only then can we conceive of the notion of foreground and background of time and of space as exhibiting various levels of interaction, rather than just being there, or not being there. Or something being selected throughout as a dominant element: foregrounding. This could also account for the modulable nature of the music/film: its lack of background and foreground enable its constituent forms (music and film) to sometimes be effective on their own. The music/film, a new form, where music and film interact on an overall basis of equality (as shown in Fig. 18), and made by the same artist, who has a sense of the limitations of the notion of background and foreground in both music and film. Composers in the classical European musical tradition, especially since 1945, have a horror of what is called ‘programme’ music, music which is intended to call up visual images. They feel that the music is diminished by the suggestion of the visual by musical means. They feel that the music becomes a mere illustration of visual elements. But they would never say this about opera. In an opera it’s fine for music to heighten our visual experience. This is because music in opera is considered to be in the foreground. And ‘programme music’, like a tone poem, or a symphonic poem, is considered to be just an illustration in sound, like much of film music is today. Which is one of the reasons why Western classical musicians look down on it: after all, it’s only a soundtrack – it’s in the background, it’s an ‘underscore’. After a screening in Budapest, someone told me that he doubted that the music/film could work: the same artist couldn’t be responsible for both music and film, and produce something effective. I think that this doubt is partly due to a traditional understanding of how film and music (foreground and background) are combined. How could the same artist be responsible for both? How could the

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same person resolve the foreground/background duality? Surely this is a battle which cannot be won? In order to understand the music/film, there needs to be as big a shift in our approach to film, as in the Euro-American attitude to land. In a recent conversation with a Mohawk student, I found that she had an attitude of acceptance with regard to land. There is no sense of conflict with either the landscape or the weather, unlike what I’d experienced so far with most citizens of Montreal I’d met. I began to understand why I’d had no visual impressions of Montreal before I’d arrived here. So, to understand the music/film, there needs to be a shift in our approach both to music and film. Instead of considering them as elements in conflict (like our struggle to own the land) we should regard them as elements which can work organically together: in a sense, to let these elements ‘own’ us. And instead of struggling against time (as in the expression ‘against the clock’ for example) to work with time and its various speeds. This is an instance where the concepts of foreground and background fall away and have to be replaced by other, more useful ideas. It’s only by this shift in our perception of foreground and background, by working with time, and allowing both music and film and their overall equal interaction to direct us, that the new form of the music/film will be at all possible.

The window lens Lenses and time When do things become smaller as you approach them, rather than bigger? Look out of that window, in the distance, over there. What do you see? Now approach the window and see what has happened to what you saw through it, when you were at a distance from the window, looking out. What you first saw has become smaller! How does this happen? 212

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The answer is in the frame. Seen from a distance to the window, the view inside the frame looks like a close-up. The foreground, the middle ground and the background are all squashed together. As you approach the window the space revealed through it becomes wider. Then, as you come up close to the window, your angle of view becomes much broader. The foreground, the middle ground and the background appear in front of your eyes, but not flattened against each other. This is like the effect produced by a wide-angle lens. A zoom lens is a series of lenses combined, from a wide-angle lens at one end, to a telephoto lens at the other end. When you zoom in to approach a subject you are apparently moving closer to it, moving from a wide angle of view, to a more narrow angle, in which the subject appears to be bigger. The zoom lens follows what we are encouraged to believe: that as you approach something it necessarily becomes bigger. So what happens when we use a zoom lens to approach the window instead? You have the wide-angle view of the window, seen from a distance to it. As we approach the window by zooming in, what happens to the view through the window? The foreground, the middle ground and the background are all squashed together. It is like a close-up. But this effect is the opposite of what we see through the window when we move towards it! In walking towards the window we are acting like a zoom lens, in reverse. Away from the window, the view through it looks like a closeup, with the foreground, middle ground and background squashed together. This is explained in part by the lessening of the parallax effect.20 Close to the window, the view becomes wider (which is why cats and people like sitting by windows).

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As with a wide-angle lens, we see a foreground, a middle ground and background. So the window has become like a lens. Without the window frame, things become bigger as you approach them. A zoom lens also makes things bigger in a similar way. But with the window frame, things become smaller as you approach them. We know that space is related to time: it takes time to move through space. We can see things in the foreground, the background and the middle ground. It takes us time to move from one to the other. Things which are close to us move faster than things which are further away. A car speeding noisily past us moves much faster than a jet silently passing overhead. Early, on a clear summer morning, swifts are madly wheeling about, sweeping low, screeching, very fast, almost colliding. Then there’s silence, and you look up. There they are, far above, more graceful, slow, a gentle silent balletic movement, an aerial choreography totally different from the close-up screaming frantic movement seen earlier. But if you were up there, the frenzy would probably be the same; the difference is only in the distance. So things which are further away seem to us to move more slowly: as such their very nature changes. Time, like space, has different layers. There is foreground time, middle ground time, background time. Each of these layers of time exists simultaneously. The layer of time of the car speeding by, in the foreground, the person walking over there, in the middle ground, the jet flying overhead, in the background. Each layer of time is different. The layers of time are also different for the car driver, the person walking, the people flying. What happens when the foreground, middle ground and background, are all squashed together?

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The layers of time are also squashed together. This is what happens to time in a close-up. Or with the telephoto end of a zoom lens. With a wide-angle view, using the wide-angle end of a zoom lens, several layers of time appear. A zoom lens not only changes our optical view of things, but it also changes our sense of time. A wide-angle lens produces a multi-layered time. In the foreground, middle ground and background. A telephoto, or long lens, shows compressed layers of time, when the foreground, middle ground and background are squashed together. Each lens has its own kind of time. A zoom lens moves through different layers of time. An extreme example of the perception of several layers of time at once combines the wide-angle with the close-up, simultaneously. This perception occurs when we look at a clear sky at night. This is the only time when, in an everyday setting, in a fully conscious state, because of the vast distances involved, what we are seeing is an image of multiple epochs simultaneously: in a single instant we see multiple layers of time, multiple light years apart. Leonardo da Vinci noted the way our perception of distance under certain light conditions is analogous to our perception of time, in particular to the way our memories link events in our lives, a way which seems to contradict linear time and therefore linear perspective: Our judgement doesn’t evaluate in their exact and congruent order things which have happened at different times in our lives; several things which took place many years ago are actually closely linked to the present, while many recent things which may appear to us to be rather old, can actually be linked back to our distant youth. The eye behaves in a similar way: distant things appear close to us when the sun shines on them, whereas things which are near to us appear to be in the distance.21

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Depending on our position in relation to the window, we will see varying layers of time through it. The window acts like a lens, without a lens. Windows behave like lenses. But they behave like lenses in reverse. At a distance from the window, the wide-angle view of what we see through it creates a close-up. And being close up to the window reveals a wide-angle view, which necessarily reduces the size of the objects seen. Sometimes this effect can be detected outside, away from windows, usually when a very large object, like a mountain, in the background, appears to dominate a house in the middle ground. Then, as you pass the house and move towards the mountain, this same mountain begins to appear smaller, more distant against the vast expanse of the flat landscape before it. But this reverse distance effect is much more noticeable with the window lens, analogous to what could be described as Leonardo’s windows of memory. Demonstrating this effect using a camera poses an interesting problem. Lenses can be considered to be an attempt to mimic how we see things, but here the window lens effect acts in the opposite way to how lenses work. So there will be a conflict in my attempt to reproduce the perceptual phenomenon of the window lens, when I use another lens to do this. A zoom lens, even at its mid-point, will not faithfully recreate the effect of the window lens, as its rate of change of field of view will not necessarily match our experience of moving towards the window in one particular instance. This is an example of the clash between an attempt to provide an objective proof of the window lens phenomenon using a camera, and our subjective perception of what happens to our sense of space as we approach a window. Our continually changing perception of space is probably as difficult to define as the continually changing perception of our memories. As Leonardo noticed, things which happened a long time ago, at a greater distance in time, can seem more vivid than recent memories, like something in the distance which is brought closer to us by the sun

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shining on it, when nearer objects that are in the shade are much less defined. Similarly, a window lens functions spatially like a vivid distant memory functions in time.

More on montage, visual and audiovisual Visual montage and editing With film editing software, I have been able to rapidly try out alternative possibilities to make certain montage choices regarding – – – –

the length of shots the juxtaposition of shots the re-arranging of the order of shots the cutting of parts of shots.

The first three items had already been familiar to me when editing film by physically cutting and splicing it. And I’d already had some experience of the cutting of parts of shots using film editing software; but now a computer enables me to experiment in a way I’d not been able to before. It means that I can rapidly try out various montage possibilities, and I have the freedom to choose one, without making a decision which I cannot undo. I don’t need to pare shots down to their desired retinal value, but I can begin to think in terms of a rhythmic flow of images, rather than just a chain of images. Editing a music/film using this technology liberates you from a whole range of conventional editing patterns like – – – –

shot/countershot the 180-degree rule eye-line matches the reaction shot

and other continuity and editing devices which create unities of place, time and action. These unities determine not only montage patterns in narrative films involving psychological naturalism, but also nature films, documentaries, scientific films – almost any type of film. 217

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Why not structure film in a musical way? Why not think in musical terms when working on the montage of a film? For the music/film I had to find another, musical way to structure the visual part of the work: – – – – – – – – – – –

to learn how to build sequences rhythmically to speed up sets of shots to slow down the pace to interrupt it to add interjecting shots to set one rhythm against another to find melodic-harmonic echoes of shots to suspend the pace to release into a rhythm after a fermata, a musical pause to use a variety of visual silences to create the biggest contrasts possible.

And at the same time, when doing the montage musically, to find the full value of each image, both in terms of its retinal value (how long it needs to live on the screen, and how it relates to the images on either side of it), as well as how it works in the context of a musical montage flow. In this way I try to make the sequence of images musical in their periodicity and in their relationship to one another. If the above conditions are not achieved, the images will cancel each other out and lack rhythm, pace and visual sense.

Audiovisual montage in The River That Walks Sound/image synaesthesia is the key to audiovisual montage. When I placed the six-organ piece on the film of The River That Walks I found that the music fitted well in terms of variety of audiovisual counterpoint: sometimes the music anticipated a change of shot, sometimes the music responded to a change of shot. On occasion (but not too frequently) music and shot change were totally simultaneous. But this was not all. Somehow the flow of the music and the film interacted so that there was not too much sameness of 218

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pace, and they played off each other as well as joined each other: the visual rhythms of the film were acting in dynamic counterpoint to the rhythms in the music. When this audiovisual phenomenon happens, the result is an interweaving of images and music, which has its own unity in combination. Out of curiosity I tried other start-points for the music in relation to the film. After about two to three hours of experiment, I returned finally to my first choice: the ‘audiovisual zero point’. This is the unique point at which sound/music and image combine in the most effective way, out of all the possible combinations. So many combinations are possible that the unconscious mind has to find the correct combination. If you try to use your conscious mind to find the audiovisual zero point, I don’t think you’ll find it. In The River That Walks the audiovisual zero point is half a second after the beginning of the shot in which the music starts. Either side of this zero point won’t do: the result will either grate or be tedious. This is because the music/film combination should not only fit at certain points of the work, but should fit throughout, like water in a plant.

Audiovisual montage in Oserake For The River That Walks I had to cut the ‘rough cut’ by half in order to have the right amount of film for the music. But I did not cut the film to the music. The film’s ‘fine cut’ and the assembling of the music were done separately. Only when I felt that I could not cut the film further without losing something did I stop the ‘fine cut’ process. With Oserake the process of audiovisual combination worked in a very different way. Sound/image synaesthesia is also important to the audiovisual montage in Oserake. But here silence plays a key role in both music and film. The silences between each block of music vary according to an organic process, so that the viewer/listener is never quite sure when the next block of music will appear. 219

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In addition the rhythms and movement in the shots and sections of the film function synaesthetically in the silences, punctuated by the actual sounds of the blocks of music. The long silences encourage this synaesthetic audiovisual rhythm, providing a not entirely imaginary counterpoint between film and music. It turned out that I’d composed more than enough music to go with this first half of the film, so it was a question of cutting down the number of blocks of music by selecting a certain number of them, and distributing them across the ‘silent’ spaces of Oserake. The first large orchestral blocks were placed at more or less intended places in the introduction to the film. But some fitted the images accidentally, like the glissandi which are combined with the shot from the study at the close of the introduction. In a variation of the audiovisual zero point method, the rest of the blocks of music in Oserake were distributed ‘blind’, in other words separately from any reference to the film. Only two of the blocks needed a slight shift to find their audiovisual zero point in their combination with the film.

Polished – the road to technical perfection In composing the music for my first opera The Kingdom, I planned everything: the music fitted exactly with each action taking place on stage, in terms of duration – I even mimed the suicide of King HenryChristophe in my study, to see how long the music accompanying it needed to be. When the opera was staged, I noticed many changes in the order of the scenes, and especially in the lengths of the scenes. My music in several places was repeated to accommodate the slow pace of the scene. In this production many scenes were much longer than I’d intended in my imaginary production, the production I’d hoped for when composing the music. This was because my conception of the work was Eisenstein-inspired and cinematic: a tightly-paced montage of attractions. Large-scale scenes contrasted with short, functional cinematic scenes. But the director’s vision was operatic: Rufus Collins had trained with The Living Theatre, and so he’d always wanted to direct a fully fledged opera. 220

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For this reason he introduced into some scenes of the production a slow and grand operatic pace. Part of my fascination with the music/film form is the possibility of avoiding the situation which arose with the production of The Kingdom. In the music/film, I shoot the film, edit it, and at the same time compose, rehearse, record and assemble the music. My concern that every detail be just right should be solved with this new form. But of course this actually doesn’t happen. All sorts of unforeseeable problems occur: technical difficulties related to film exposure, focussing, scratched film, sound and music recording, acoustics, errors in the performance of the music and so on. Then you realise that errors will always be part of a work, like errors are part of daily life. When you begin composing and creating you want everything to be ‘just so’. You look for the immaculate (though I’ve never aimed for the highly polished, even in The Kingdom). As more of my work is realised, I’ve learnt that perhaps the most effective results are not related to polish and perfection, but what should be a totally compulsive experience of the work, an experience so compelling that the inevitable small errors and roughness (of which the artist is painfully aware) are not even noticed by the viewer/listener, who is absorbed in experiencing the ‘pull’ of the work. I think that this is what happened with The Kingdom: the slowing down of its pace didn’t prevent its effectiveness as a performance. Years later, and several productions later, I feel that the inevitable rough edges in a work contribute to its life and vigour in performance, or to the presentation of the work. In some cases, as in the production of Rabelaisdada, a play for voices, errors became an inherent part of the work’s character. Occasionally the actors would make a mistake in pronouncing some deliberately difficult-to-pronounce words, and another actor would help out. A bottle would be knocked over, or a balloon would burst, the music stand holding the text would be knocked over – all these errors the actors incorporated into their performance, never letting up on the pace of the action. In a different type of work, errors which impede effectiveness have to be eliminated. But one shouldn’t worry too much about lesser errors, as it’s most likely that they won’t even be noticed.

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A work which has too much polish will draw the audience’s attention to that polish, so the work becomes the polish: it becomes a work which is about its polish, rather than anything else more compelling.

A conversation after a visit to Picasso’s studio, 1943 The poet and painter Henri Michaux was talking to Brassa¨ı, the photographer – they had just visited Picasso in his studio in Paris, and Michaux had never met Picasso before. Michaux confided to Brassa¨ı that he had had enough of writing poetry – now he would turn more to painting, as visual artists like Picasso could present their drawings, paintings and sculptures directly to others, whereas poets have to rely on the performance of their work. Brassa¨ı said that the same was true of music: if it’s not performed, then it’s just a stack of notes. Michaux replied that young composers writing a symphony would only have a one in ten chance of hearing it performed once during their lifetime.22 Fortunately, because of recent developments in audiovisual technology and the Internet, you can make music/films – and you can show them to others as easily as Picasso could show you his paintings, drawings and sculptures, or Brassa¨ı his photographs, or Michaux his paintings.

The tripod One of the things I need when shooting is solitude. This may appear eccentric, as most films are collaborative creations. On occasion I have seen fleets of mobile artists’ rooms in a Montreal street, with groups of people hanging around waiting to set up the next shoot. Not a solitary activity. When shooting, I need to have the direct uninterrupted contact with what I am filming. An assistant would get in the way. Loading reels of 16 mm film is out of the question. Even changing Super 8 cartridges seems to take an age – so much is being missed when you are doing it. Once, when assisting another student on a film project, we were using a tripod. 222

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A security car stopped by and we were asked what we were up to. Did we have a permit? Once in Manhattan, for Invisible City, I filmed close-ups of neon signs in Lexington Avenue shop windows at 1 a.m. No interruptions by the police. A tripod marks the dividing line between police interest and police indifference. In a public space it marks the dividing line between the official and the unofficial. It’s the difference between the straight line and the meandering line. In his autobiography, Frank Lloyd Wright tells how, when he was a boy, his uncle walked with him up a snow-covered hill. ‘I’ll show you how to go,’ he said to the boy. Once they’d reached the top, he pointed down to the straight path he’d made in the snow, as compared with the young boy’s meandering path. Because Frank had been all over the place, rushing from weed to weed, collecting all the marvellous variety of plant structures. So there they were, looking down from the top of the snowy hill, one with an armful of captivating weeds and a meandering path through the snow, and the other with a straight path and nothing else.23

Pause/freeze Once we had completed the rough cut of Oserake, my wife and I experimented with the use of freeze frames in this part of the film. When we included the freeze frames we found that they looked artificial. They broke the surrounding editing rhythm on either side of the pause on the shot. We tried to hold a pause on more than one frame, but the result was simply a mechanically vibrating image, not the result I was looking for. I was hoping to use the freeze frame to extend some shots I’d found to be too short in the rough cut. But when we froze these shots we found that they lost interest, as they were extended beyond their retinal value. After the fine cut, these shots now appeared to be slightly longer in comparison with the other longer shots which form part of the existing weave of images. 223

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In fact none of the freeze frames we tried worked. This was because they were too much of a contrast with the hand-held nature of the other shots: the living nature of the image disappeared, it became a lifeless image. Perhaps the freeze frame would have worked better in the context of a ‘tripod’ film. But even in commercial films there is a slight unsteady quality to the screen image. Perhaps we need this slight vibration of the image in cinema, as it corresponds to the way we see. We don’t watch things as if our head were clamped in a vice. However, I was concerned anyway about the use of freeze frames in Oserake: this use of a special effect could be inconsistent with my intention to use organic filters (dust, various types of snow, insect netting) and found special effects. In other words, to capture images which were already of sufficient interest not to require post-production manipulation. The unsteadiness of exposure of some images (like the trees by the river in the morning sun at the beginning of The River That Walks) are like the sense of glare created by the iris in our eyes, as they adjust to accommodate the very bright light in such a scene. Somehow this makes the image more alive than if the exposure had just been at one level, and the image a fixed and polished one. Lastly, I noticed that when we added music to the fine cut, this had the effect of further extending the retinal value of the shots I had thought were too short.

Energy and imagination The path my feet took was lined with images, whole gardens of pictures.24

I have selected this sentence by the American photographer Minor White, as it expresses the excitement of working with a camera outside, in a landscape. He trained as a botanist, influenced by his experience of his grandmother’s large garden, which he explored as a child. Minor White describes taking photographs outside in terms of picking arrangements of flowers, plants – part of the process of visualisation, where you seize images all around you. Here you establish a sensory link, an association, before the image is captured. Then there is a flow of 224

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associations which opens out from the sequence, which triggers mood, emotion and meanings. Very concerned with precision, Minor White taught the Zone System, a means of attaining a degree of control over the complex reciprocities involved in exposure times, lens types, film characteristics, and qualities of light. Inevitably, working with the Super 8 camera and an automated exposure system, my approach to capturing images represents a very different technical approach, as I believe that the Super 8 format captures more closely the imprecise way we see things. We don’t see with the precision of 16 mm and the all-encompassing detail of 35 mm, 70 mm and Omnimax. When we see in an everyday context, the seen is interwoven with images from the brain, which appear at the same time as what we see around us. Our perception is a combination of the outside going in, and the inside going out. The imprecision of Super 8 captures these fleeting perceptions and the movements and selections of our mobile roving eye. The eye is a thinking and dreaming camera, as the actual camera doesn’t think or dream. This sense of energy and movement in perception is present in the Cantos of Ezra Pound. George Kearns, a specialist on the poet, describes the mental leaps involved. He points out that Pound is not literal, not immediately comprehensible: the poet uses the power of associations, aphorisms, juxtapositions, so the reader has to participate in the making of meaning. This effort, this collaborative process in reading, results in a more personal and therefore more memorable experience of Pound’s poetry.25 A similar process of perceptual collaboration appears when we look at some of Minor White’s best-known photographs: those he took of frost on windows. These images become images of images: the crystal forms immediately set in motion the dynamic process of association, in our attempt to understand why what we know from tactile experience is frozen water, yet appears at the same time to be something completely different. The Swedish writer and playwright August Strindberg tried to make sense of this phenomenon in his photographic capturing of water crystal formations on glass plates. He calls these shapes ‘aggregates, flowers of ice’, which he writes opened for him astonishing perspectives into nature’s mysteries. He wonders if the water, having interacted with

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plants so many times, is ultimately responsible for the structural forms of plants. Or if the opposite is the case: that various plant forms have influenced the shapes water takes on in its process of crystallisation.26 Though we may never know the answer to Strindberg’s question, we still are left with the inescapable fact that water is the common element both in the existence of plants and in the forms of its crystals. In this sense it is analogous to the capturing of images in photography itself, where the image both is and is not what is represented. And it is this tension between the two realities which releases the flow of associations, through which we attempt to understand our experience.

Thinking about digital thinking Working with computers not for word processing or using the internet, but for editing film, sound and music, has prompted some thinking about digital thinking. The invention of computers isn’t synonymous with digital thinking, as analogue thinking (from Alan Turing, Tommy Flowers the inventor of the ‘Colossus’, and others) was at the origin of today’s machines. At some point, the transition from this analogue thinking to a wholly digital approach, to 1/0, on/off, took place. (The problem about the twentieth-century history of computer developments is that much information was kept under wraps, when great progress was made under conditions of wartime secrecy, during World War II.) It seems to me that this change to the ‘all or nothing’ structure is at the root of all the advantages and disadvantages of our ‘digital age’. Let me give an example in an attempt to make sense of this conclusion. Take two cases: 1. A white circle and a black circle. 2. Two circles, each one a different shade of grey. In the first case we can say, without any ambiguity, that one circle is black, and the other is white. This is like digital thinking: one circle is something that the other is not. This is an on/off, 1/0 situation, without any room for confusion. 226

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In the second case we can clearly say that there are two circles, each a different shade of grey. But there is a problem of definition here, as both circles are grey: they are each variants, or a different nuance, of the same concept. Describing these circles to someone over the phone, one could say that one circle is a lighter shade of grey than the other. However, our listener wouldn’t readily picture the circles as clearly as in the first case, where one is black and the other white. So what do we do to explain to our listener the difference in appearance in the second case? It seems to me that we resort to analogy to solve this problem. For example, we could say that one circle is silver grey, and the other is pewter grey. In this way the difference between the two becomes clearer. This is not digital thinking, but analogical thinking. So what? So far everything is obvious: we already know about this. But something extraordinary happens when we do something to both cases. What happens if we multiply each case by a very large number, say 10,000? In the first case we have 10,000 circles. However, these circles are still all black or all white. When we see them we can say that these are the black circles and these are the white circles. But what happens when we multiply the second case by this very large number? We are faced with 10,000 shades of grey. What can we say? How do we describe all these shades? It’s no longer possible to use analogical thinking here. So how do we show the difference between each of these 10,000 shades of grey? Where is the certainty of the first case? In what way can we clearly show the differences? The only thing which can be clearly said is: ‘This is grey. Everything else is not grey.’ So now the second case becomes identical to the first case: everything is either something or nothing. Analogical thinking has been transformed into digital thinking: just by multiplying each case by a large number, any large number.

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If we compare an analogical machine (like an automobile) with a today’s computers (digital machines) we can see the result of the above two cases in practice. In a car we switch on the ignition; then there’s only one way to do the next thing, like turning right/left, going forwards/backwards. Any alternative is due to something beyond the agency of the machine or the person operating it. (The exception is braking, which for practical purposes can be done in more than one way.) With a computer, once you switch it on, there immediately follows more than one way of doing the same thing, whether you need more than one way or not. This impractical proliferation is an inescapable aspect of the digital machine. Why? This is because you have an entire technological structure which is built on something which is either one or zero, on or off. The only way such a technology can simulate analogy (or be of practical use to us) is by using very large numbers; hence the proliferation which is an overt characteristic of digital technology, as well as its relentless demand for increased memory. The digital demand for increased memory is just a way of coping with the limitations of the idea on which this technology is built: the on/off concept. If you have enough multiplications of the first and second cases above, not only does analogical thinking become digital thinking, but digital thinking attempts to simulate analogical thinking. I say ‘attempts to simulate analogical thinking’ because I believe that our senses are still sufficiently sophisticated to be able to distinguish the difference between the two types of thinking, and therefore the two types of technology. Our eye does detect the difference between images which are captured by digital technology, which currently have up to 256 discrete steps of a grey-scale tonal range, as opposed to the analogue technology of film which can capture up to 16,384 discrete steps. If we think of these ‘discrete steps’ as nuances captured in the transformation of the billions of silver halide crystals in film emulsion, we can understand the effectiveness of this analogue technology, which doesn’t depend on the electronic translation of nuances into sets of on/off structures called pixels. Our senses work analogically, and are attuned to gradation and nuance. As sentient beings we aren’t comfortable with the seemingly

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limitless: we need analogies as anchors in the chaos of vast numbers of choices. When someone in a ‘digital age’ sales pitch states that digital technology has endless possibilities, only limited by our imagination, this is misleading. Vast numbers of choices are more likely to paralyse our analogue-type imagination, rather than to release it from its confines. When we are faced with such an immense array of choices, we can either cope with the almost limitless possibilities through analogies, or capitulate by defaulting to on/off digital thinking. Or for the time being, until a better technology comes along, we can choose to combine the two approaches, and so benefit from the advantages of each.

The modulable form In the music for two pianos for Act 1, Scene 2 of Empedocles, a dance opera, I composed a prelude and fugue which is played in canon with itself. The prelude in one of the pianos is a little shorter than the one for the other piano, so each player starts to play the same fugue at a different time. In my score, the pianists finish at the same time. In performance, because of natural rubato (the slight tempo fluctuations which are normal in the performance of music) one pianist will finish before the other. Rubato is something which is never quite the same in each performance. So when the piece is performed neither pianist will know which one will finish first. So my score is substantially different from the performance it is intended to notate. And each performance is even more different because this piece is primarily tonal. The shifts and changes between the music for each piano will produce a result which will be substantially different, harmonically, melodically and rhythmically, each time the work is performed. In this way I was able to introduce a wide variety of possibilities within a highly controlled form (the fugue). The music sounds improvised, but at the same time we think that it’s unlikely to have been improvised. This is one of the characteristics I’m aiming for in music: a combination of the unpredictable and the recognisable. In terms of the music/film, this means that there is a sense that the music is not necessarily fixed. This is to get away from the fixed nature of a film and a recording. 229

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I also see the film as having an improvisatory quality, within a form which is organically related to it, but which is also perceptible. The audiovisual interaction in a music/film can also have this improvisatory quality, and yet still have this sense of the totally complementary, produced by the audiovisual zero point. The music for six church organs for The River That Walks is dependent on the continuous overlapping of harmonies. Each chord has to be precisely the right length; otherwise gaps will occur, in the form of silences, thereby interrupting the intended flow of the piece. In my score there are no gaps, no silences between the chords, except for a deliberate silence before the final chord. When I assembled this piece on the computer, I found that silences appeared between the chords. This was because rubato had appeared in my performance. I had to make some timing adjustments to get the continuous sound I’d composed in the score. However, because of rubato, each performance and recording of this piece will be a substantially different approximation of the original score. Because of the harmonic (major/minor and modal) structures I’ve used in the piece, each realisation will sound different, as in the fugue from Empedocles. The music for The River That Walks could also be performed in a church with five pre-recorded organs on spatially divided speakers, with one organ being played live. Even a performance like this would vary from the one notated in my original score. This is a development of techniques used by composers like Stockhausen, Earle Brown and others in the 1960s. The aleatoric spirit of Alexander Calder’s mobiles influenced Earle Brown’s music, and it is also there in the works of his contemporaries. They used mostly hyper-chromatic harmonies, ones which don’t offer substantial differences when combined in various ways in each performance. But because I use tonal and modal harmonic structures, the differences in each performance are more noticeable and more memorable. These differences are clearly recognisable in harmonic, rhythmic, and even melodic terms. The result isn’t like a mobile, with moveable parts which are noticeably part of the same articulated structure, and

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where it’s not easy or even important to remember the variants; the result is more like a set of different mobiles. The music score itself has become something different – its function has changed. It’s no longer a notation of the definitive version, but of one possible variant. This is worrying, as it changes the Western concept of music notation. Music notation began as an aid to memory, then became codified as the definitive version of a piece of music. But what about the idea of a modulable score? One which exists as one variant of several substantially different possibilities? One idea leads to another. This modulable form is transferable. The film part of The River That Walks can be shown as a loop, for example in a museum, or in the window display of a shop. The music can be performed on its own, too, as described above. My wife thinks that the music for Oserake could be combined with dance: a dance piece would take the place of the film. So all these variants in performance or presentation make the music/film a modulable work. It’s strange that a form which exists because of the precision of an audiovisual zero point should generate variants in this way. Perhaps it’s a natural way of overcoming the limitations of this audiovisual zero point and the unique work? The more precise a work becomes, the more it generates variants. The more modulable a work becomes, the more it produces substantially different yet precise forms.

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Notes Introduction 1

‘Keepers of a Flame that Burned for Russia’, The New York Times Sunday, 5 July 1998.

Chapter 1: Do The Eisenstein Thing 1 2

3

Robert Robertson, Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema (London: I.B.Tauris Publishers, 2011), 78. But not at the very beginning of the film, the part of a film which we tend to forget most easily. Spike Lee actually begins Do The Right Thing with music, specifically the melody Lift Every Voice and Sing, performed as a saxophone jazz solo, starting with a black screen, before the appearance of Universal’s logo. This melody was composed by John Rosamund Johnson (1873–1954), for the words of the poem by his brother James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), the principal of a segregated school. This song became associated with the country-wide battle against racism in the United States, and later the Civil Rights movement. It has become known as ‘The African-American National Anthem’, and as such has been closely associated with the fight for equal rights for all AfricanAmericans. Spike Lee in his commentary on his film mentions how he approached his friend Chuck D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour), in Public Enemy, specifically to commission from him a rap to express the rage of young African-American men, to be played on Radio Raheem’s boom-box throughout Do The Right Thing.

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11

In his commentary Lee asks: ‘How do you express heat?’ and immediately answers, ‘By colour.’ He also mentions being influenced by the statistic about the murder rate and ninety-degree heat. Robertson, Eisenstein on the Audiovisual, 184–185. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 183. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 169. Eisenstein, S.M. Notes of a Film Director, trans. X. Danko, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1970), 125.

Chapter 2: Double Echoes: Music and Sound in David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Chris Rodley, ed. Lynch on Lynch (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999), 222. Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, 241. Ibid., 240, 241. Ibid., 238. Ibid., 227. Glissandi is the plural of glissando: a pitch which slides up or down to another pitch. Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, 227. Ibid. Ibid., 222, 223. Ibid., 231. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 240. Ibid., 224, 225. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 242.

Chapter 3: Audiovisual Irony, Terror, Ecstasy 1

234

S.M. Eisenstein, Writings, 1922–34, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor, vol. 1, S.M. Eisenstein: Selected Works (London: BFI; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 113.

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Paul Cronin, ed., Herzog on Herzog (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2002), 70. S.M. Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 155.

NOTES

2

Chapter 4: Where’s The Film Composer? 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13

14

Michel Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, trans. Claudia Gorbman (London: BFI Publishing, Macmillan, 2001), 3. Mario Falsetto, Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick (New York: G.K. Hall, 1996), 34. Michel Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 26. Ibid., 14, 15. Ibid., 19. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (Petaluma, California: Pomegranate Communications Inc.), undated reprint of the Duell, Sloan and Pearce edition, 1943, 340. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, 341. Falsetto, Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick, 35. Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 93. Ibid. Ibid. In 1986 I was told by a friend of Toru Takemitsu how Akira Kurosawa, when he was filming on location for Ran, had instructed the Japanese composer to think of Mahler as a model for his score for the film. Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 24. The phenomenon to which Chion refers here, ‘the peculiar capacity for music to “grow into” the film with repetition and time’, reminds me of something Picasso once said about his work. If the elements in a painting he was working on didn’t quite seem to go together, he would go away from it for a while. On looking at the painting on his return, he would often find that the disparate elements had in his absence somehow learned ‘to get along’ with each other. For me this is analogous to the way in which music and film can, as Chion says, ‘with repetition and time’ grow into each other’s shared audiovisual space. Mario Falsetto, Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2001), xviii–xix.

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Chapter 5: Filmic Choreographies: A Backward Glance 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

236

L´eonard de Vinci, Proph´eties, pr´ec´ed´e de Philosophie et Aphorismes, trans. Louise Servicen (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2010), 37, 39, 48, 50, 54. My translation. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1970), 215. John H. Whitney, on The Screening Room, presented by Robert Gardner, ABC TV Boston, at midnight on Mondays (1970s). Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 221, 222. John H. Whitney, on The Screening Room. Young blood, 223. Ibid., 218, 219. William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 144. Roger Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography (Auckland: Auckland University Press, New Zealand, 2001), 170. Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, 27. Ibid., 28, 34. Len Lye: The Body Electric, exhibition guide (Birmingham, UK: Ikon Gallery, 2011), 3. Horrocks, 27, 28, 34. Ibid., 29, 30, 31. Ibid., 34, 39, 40–42, 58. Ibid., 54, 55. Horrocks, 35, 45–56, Anne Kirker, Len Lye: The Early Years in London, www.art-newzealand.com/Issues11to20/Lye08.htm. (accessed 6 July 2014). Horrocks, 57–67, 399 n. 32; Anne Kirker, Len Lye: The Early Years in London. Horrocks, 57–67, 79–82, 87, 88. Ibid., 91, 136, 137, 153, 159, 236. Ibid., 236, 256, 259, 260. Ibid., 263, 266. Ibid., 19, 264, 265. Jeffrey Spivak, Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 13–24. Jeffrey Spivak, Buzz, 38.

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Ibid., 49. Ibid., 71, 72. Ibid., 51, 52.

NOTES

26 27 28

Chapter 6: Maya Deren: Meshes of the Audiovisual 1

2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Bruce R. McPherson, ed., Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren (Kingston, New York: McPherson & Company, 2005), 156, 157. McPherson, Essential Deren, 253. Ibid., 133, 134, 174, 175. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 255. Ibid., 8, 9. Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (Kingston, New York: McPherson & Company, 1983), 5, 6, 7. www.allmusic.com/ artist/teiji-ito-mn0000781821. (accessed 6 July 2014). Essential Deren, 103. Ibid., 218, 229, 230. Ibid., 165, 200. Ibid., 200, 201. Ibid., 118, 160. Ibid., 250, 251. Ibid., 152. 1947. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 197–200. Ibid., 199. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 201, 157, 158, 220–224. Ibid., 175, 231–233. Ibid., 251. Ibid., 93, 94. Ibid., 23, 159. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 121, 127, 128, 211, 179, 246, 247.

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Chapter 7: The Audiovisual Imagination Beyond The European Tradition 1 2 3

Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, trans. Audie E. Bock (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1982), 192. Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, 197. Ibid., 193.

Chapter 8: Sonic Art, Digital Cinema – Chris H. Lynn: A Trilogy of Summer 1

With many thanks to Chris H. Lynn for the information regarding the circumstances in which his films A Trilogy of Summer were made, and for the valuable information about the Literati artists.

Chapter 9: Two Films With Little Music 1 2 3

4 5

6 7 8

9

238

New York Daily News, 8 January 2002. Fritz Lang interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich, 1965. Expressionism was an artistic movement which originated in Germany in the early twentieth century. See Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. Roger Greaves (London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1973). Lang interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich, 1965. George Grosz, German artist (1893–1959). In his graphic work and in his paintings realised during the 1920s, Grosz savaged the corrupt underbelly of German urban society. His work from this period is unforgettable – check it out on the Net! Lang interview, Peter Bogdanovich, 1965. Ibid. ‘Of all the German film-makers it was Fritz Lang who felt Max Reinhardt’s influence the most.’ (Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 90). Here Eisner is referring to films made in the 1920s in Germany. Franc¸ois Truffaut, Hitchcock (London: Collins Publishing Group, 1986), 516.

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Robert Robertson, Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema (London: I.B.Tauris Publishers, 2011), 142– 155. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 11, 12. Ibid., 266. Ibid., 262; Dan Auiler, Hitchcock’s Notebooks (New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1999), 464. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 265. Dan Auiler, Hitchcock’s Notebooks, 483. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 65. Ibid. 265. Hitchcock’s Notebooks, 464, 465. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 90, 91, 265. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 342. Ibid., 22. Lang interview: Bogdanovich, 1965.

NOTES

10

Chapter 10: The Audiovisual in Three Found Footage Films 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Annette Michelson, ed., Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 137. Michelson, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 111 Ibid., lx. Roger Sutherland, New Perspectives in Music (London: Sun Tavern Fields, 1994), 112. Sutherland, New Perspectives in Music, 117. Odile Vivier, Var`ese (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), 126. Wim Mertens, American Minimal Music (London: Kahn & Averill, 1983), 19. Sutherland, 178. Mertens, American Minimal Music, 20. Ibid., 19, 44. A.A. Bronson, ed., From Sea to Shining Sea: Artist-initiated Activity in Canada, 1939–1987 (Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987), 27. Tom Graff, ed., Jack Chambers Films, in The Capilano Review, No. 33 (Vancouver: Capilano College, 1984), 73.

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Ross G. Woodman, Chambers: John Chambers Interviewed by Ross G. Woodman (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1967), 3. Graff, Jack Chambers Films, 71–72. Woodman, Chambers: John Chambers Interviewed by Ross G. Woodman, 7. Stan Brakhage, in Brakhage/Elder Lectures, unpublished transcript (Regina: Saskatchewan Film Pool Cooperative, 1988), 49, 50. Graff, 66. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 68. Michelson, xxiii. Ibid., 119.

Chapter 11: Two Audiovisual Collages: Pasolini and Paradjanov 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

240

Naomi Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 18. Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy, 7, 8. Oswald Stack, Pasolini on Pasolini (London: Thames & Hudson, British Film Institute, 1969), 190. Greene, 12, 13. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roman Poems, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 11, 13. Robert Robertson, ‘Film and The Ocean of Music’, in Filmwaves, Issue 7 (London: Obraz Productions Ltd, 1999), 29. Nico Naldini, Pasolini: Biographie, trans. Ren´e de Ceccatty (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 237. Greene, 21. Ibid., 73. Stack, Pasolini on Pasolini, 94. Stack, 77. Ibid., 82. Robert Robertson, Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2011), 138. Stack, 40. Barth David Schwartz, Pasolini Requiem (New York: Random House Inc., 1995), 447. Stack, 146.

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19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Naldini, Pasolini: Biographie, 372, 373. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ecrits sur la peinture, ed. and trans. Herv´e JoubertLaurencin (Paris: Editions Carr´e, 1997), 79–81; Stack, 85, 86. Greene, 74, 75. Greene, 46. Schwartz, Pasolini Requiem, 357. Stack, 39, 40. Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Observations on the Long Take’, in Filmwaves, Issue 9, trans. Maria La Falce (London: Obraz Productions Ltd, 1999) 9, 32. Stack, 83. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 86. Greene, 48. Stack, 28. Pier Paolo Pasolini, L’exp´erience h´er´etique, trans. Anna Rocchi Pullberg (Paris: Payot, 1976), 122. Stack, 132. Stack, 70. Pasolini, Ecrits sur la peinture, 73. Stack, 84. Greene, 73. Stack, 55. Ecrits sur la peinture, 70. Patrick Cazals, Serguei Paradjanov (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile/Cahiers du cin´ema, 1993), 13, 14. Patrick Cazals, Serguei Paradjanov, 154–157. Ibid., 158. Ibid., 51, 56, 62–65. Zaven Sargsyan and Levon Abrahamian, Sergei Paradjanov: Selected Artworks (Yerevan: Sergei Paradjanov Museum, 2011), 14. Patrick Cazals, Serguei Paradjanov, 60, 117, 118. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 13, 41. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 110, 128, 129, 158. Ibid., 125.

NOTES

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Chapter 12: ‘The echo of many voices’: Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

242

Ibid., 95. Ibid., 84, 118, 125. Ibid., 118. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 160.

Michael Charlesworth, Derek Jarman (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2011), 33–45. Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge, ed. Shaun Allen (London: Quartet Books Limited, 1984), 114. Charlesworth, Derek Jarman, 46–49. Jarman’s books based on his journals include Dancing Ledge (1984), Kicking the Pricks, originally titled The Last of England (1987), Modern Nature (1991), and published posthumously: Chroma: A Book of Colour (1994) and Smiling in Slow Motion (2000). Derek Jarman, Chroma: A Book of Colour (London: Random House, 1994), 75–77. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, 128. Derek Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, ed. Keith Collins (London: The Random House Group Limited, 2000), 192. Jarman, Smiling in Slow Motion, 319, 320; Charlesworth, Derek Jarman, 174, 175. Jarman, Chroma, 106–124. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 51, 54. Jarman, Dancing Ledge, 140. Derek Jarman, Kicking the Pricks (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1987), 103. Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, 102. Charlesworth, Derek Jarman, 106, 107. Jarman, Kicking the Pricks, 96. Jarman, Chroma, 31.

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Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), 72.

NOTES

17

Chapter 13: Three Russians: The Audiovisual and the Long Take 1 2 3

4 5 6 7

Robert Robertson, Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2011), 86. S.M. Eisenstein, Nonindifferent Nature, trans. Herbert Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 376. S.M. Eisenstein, Ivan the Terrible: A Screenplay by Sergei M. Eisenstein, trans. and ed. Ivor Montagu, trans. Herbert Marshall (London: Secker & Warburg, 1963), 42, 43, 47. Robertson, Eisenstein on the Audiovisual, 61. Ibid., 97, 98. Ibid., 117. Ibid., 101–103.

Chapter 14: Empedocles Intertransparency and the Leaping Elements 1

2

This is a revised version of an article published in the international journal Interfaces 13, Image, Texte, Langage, Centre de Recherche Image Texte Langage, Universit´e de Bourgogne, in June 1998, 213–221. Many thanks to Professor Fr´ed´eric Og´ee for his kind assistance with the permission to publish this article in this slightly modified form. Etienne Sved, Provence des Campaniles (Paris: Editions Etienne Sved, 1971), 176.

Chapter 15: Diary of a Music/Film 1 2 3 4

Yoyo Maeght, The Maeght Family: A Passion for Modern Art (New York: Abrams, 2006), 46. Robert Robertson, Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2011), 133. Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, trans. Audie E. Bock (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1982), 172. Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions, based on ‘Mein Weltbild’, ed. Carl Seelig (New York: Bonzana Books, 1954), 8–11.

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13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20

244

The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1997), 119. Mark Crispin Miller, Kubrick’s Anti-Reading of the Luck of Barry Lyndon, http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0087.html#n3. Mario Falsetto, Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick (New York: G.K. Hall, 1996), 35. My wife drew my attention to this strange sound, and we agreed that it would work as the beginning of Oserake. Female Landscape (1972) by Gerald Gladstone, Canadian sculptor and painter (1929–2005). Antonin Artaud, Les Tarahumaras (Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1971), 43, 44. ‘How to Succeed in Business’, The Gazette, Montreal, 11 August 2001. Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967) was a ferocious defender of abstract art. However, he was also a prolific cartoonist; it was almost as if this activity was a release for his figurative talent. Occasionally the two tendencies mix, as in the cartoon he did of a ‘man-in-the-street’ laughing and pointing to an abstract painting, and saying something like, ‘So what does that picture represent?’ Next, the painting itself comes alive, points to the man and asks him, ‘So what do you represent?’ Mario Falsetto, Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick (New York: G.K. Hall, 1996), 34. Mario Falsetto, Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick, 280. Ibid. 221. August Strindberg, The Plays, trans. and ed. Michael Meyers (London: Secker & Warburg, 1975), 553. My thanks to Jeff Higley, Chair of the Landscape and Arts Network, for permission to reprint my text The Wilderness of the Imagination, which was first published in the journal Landscape and Arts, Number 36, Spring 2006. In these texts I use the terms ‘editing’ and ‘montage’ in the following way: editing: the act of cutting, splicing and assembling film, on or off the computer; montage: the creative thinking which drives the act of editing. Francisco Aranda, Luis Bu˜nuel: A Critical Biography, trans. and ed. David Robinson (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975), 91. Each eye produces a different angle of view, and their combined views help to produce our perception of three-dimensional space. This effect

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22 23

24 25 26

is called parallax. The further away we look, the more this effect of parallax is reduced, and so the more flattened our sense of external space becomes. L´eonard de Vinci, Proph´eties, pr´ec´ed´e de Philosophie et Aphorismes, trans. Louise Servicen (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2010), 11, 12. My translation. Georges Brassa¨ı, Conversations avec Picasso (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 73. Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (Petaluma, California: Pomegranate Communications Inc., undated reprint of the Duell, Sloan and Pearce edition, 1943), 3, 4. Minor White, Rites and Passages (Millerton, New York: Aperture Inc., 1978), 12. George Kearns, Ezra Pound: The Cantos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8, 9, 15–17. Cl´ement Ch´eroux, L’Exp´erience photographique d’August Strindberg (Arles: Actes Sud, 1994), 39.

NOTES

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Bibliography Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975. Albrecht, Donald, ed. The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York 1997. Aranda Francisco: Luis Bu˜nuel: A Critical Biography. David Robinson, trans. and ed. London: Secker and Warburg, 1975. Artaud, Antonin. Les Tarahumaras. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1971. Auiler, Dan. Hitchcock’s Notebooks. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1999. Brakhage, Stan, and Elder, R. Bruce. Brakhage/Elder Lectures. Unpublished transcript, Regina: Saskatchewan Film Pool Cooperative, 1988. Brassa¨ı, Georges. Conversations avec Picasso. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Bronson, A.A., ed. From Sea to Shining Sea: Artist-initiated Activity in Canada, 1939– 1987. Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987. Cazals, Patrick. Serguei Paradjanov. Paris: Editions de l’Etoile/Cahiers du cin´ema, 1993. Charlesworth, Michael. Derek Jarman. London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 2011. Ch´eroux, Cl´ement. L’Exp´erience photographique d’August Strindberg. Arles: Actes Sud, 1994. Chion, Michel. Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey. Claudia Gorbman, trans. London: BFI Publishing, Macmillan, 2001. Cronin, Paul, ed. Herzog on Herzog. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2002. Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Kingston, New York: McPherson & Company, 1983. Einstein, Albert. Ideas and Opinions, based on ‘Mein Weltbild’. Carl Seelig, ed. New York: Bonzana Books, 1954.

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Eisenstein, S. M. Ivan the Terrible: A Screenplay by Sergei M. Eisenstein. Ivor Montagu, trans. and ed. Herbert Marshall, trans. London: Secker & Warburg, 1963. . Notes of a Film Director. X. Danko, trans. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1970. . Nonindifferent Nature. Herbert Marshall, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. . Writings, 1922–34. Vol. 1. Selected Works. Richard Taylor, ed. and trans. London: BFI Publishing, 1988. Eisner, Lotte H. The Haunted Screen. Roger Greaves, trans. London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1973. Falsetto, Mario. Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick. New York: G.K. Hall, 1996. . Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 2001. Graff, Tom, ed. ‘Jack Chambers Films’, The Capilano Review, No 33. Vancouver: Capilano College, 1984. Greene, Naomi. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990. Horrocks, Roger. Len Lye: A Biography, Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press, 2001. Jarman, Derek. Dancing Ledge. Shaun Allen ed. London: Quartet Books Limited, 1984. . Kicking the Pricks. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1987. . Chroma: A Book of Colour. London: Random House, 1994. . Smiling in Slow Motion. Keith Collins, ed. London: The Random House Group Limited, 2000. Kearns, George. Ezra Pound: The Cantos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Kurosawa, Akira. Something Like an Autobiography. Audie E. Bock, trans. New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1982. Maeght, Yoyo. The Maeght Family: A Passion for Modern Art, New York: Abrams, 2006. McPherson, Bruce R., ed. Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren, Kingston, New York: McPherson & Company, 2005. Mertens, Wim. American Minimal Music, London: Kahn & Averill, 1983. Michelson, Annette, ed. Kevin O’Brien, trans. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Naldini, Nico. Pasolini: Biographie. Ren´e de Ceccatty, trans. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Ecrits sur la peinture. Herv´e Joubert-Laurencin, ed. and trans. Paris: Editions Carr´e, 1997. . L’exp´erience h´er´etique. Anna Rocchi Pullberg, trans. Paris: Payot, 1976.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

. Roman Poems. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Francesca Valente, trans. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986. . ‘Observations on the Long Take’, in Filmwaves, Issue 9. Maria La Falce, trans. London: Obraz Productions Ltd, 1999. Robertson, Robert. ‘Empedocles, Intertransparency and the Leaping Elements’, in Interfaces: Image Texte Langage 13. Centre de Recherche Image Texte Langage, Universit´e de Bourgogne, June 1998. . ‘Film and The Ocean of Music’, in Filmwaves, Issue 7. London: Obraz Productions Ltd, 1999. . Eisenstein on the Audiovisual: The Montage of Music, Image and Sound in Cinema. London: I.B.Tauris Publishers, 2011. Rodley, Chris, ed. Lynch on Lynch. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1999. Sargsyan, Zaven and Levon Abrahamian. Sergei Paradjanov: Selected Artworks. Yerevan: Sergei Paradjanov Museum, 2011. Schwartz, Barth David. Pasolini Requiem. New York: Random House Inc., 1995. Spivak, Jeffrey. Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2010. Stack, Oswald. Pasolini on Pasolini. London: Thames & Hudson, British Film Institute, 1969. Strindberg, August. The Plays. Michael Meyers, trans. London: Secker & Warburg, 1975. Sutherland, Roger. New Perspectives in Music. London: Sun Tavern Fields, 1994. Sved, Etienne. Provence des Campaniles. Paris: Editions Etienne Sved, 1971. Truffaut, Franc¸ois. Hitchcock. London: Collins Publishing Group, 1986. Vinci, L´eonard de. Proph´eties, pr´ec´ed´e de Philosophie et Aphorismes. Louise Servicen, trans. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2010. Vivier, Odile. Var`ese. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973. Wees, William C. Light Moving in Time, Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of AvantGarde Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. White, Minor. Rites and Passages. Millerton, New York: Aperture Inc., 1978. Woodman, Ross G. Chambers: John Chambers Interviewed by Ross G. Woodman. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1967. Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. Petaluma, California: Pomegranate Communications Inc., undated reprint of the Duell, Sloan and Pearce edition, 1943. Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1970.

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Index 2001: A Space Odyssey, 35–50, 54, 180, 207 Abachidze, Dodo, 145 Accattone (book), 131, Accattone (film), 132, 138 Achik Kerib, 145, 149, 150 Adam, Adolphe, 149 Adler, Renata, 37 Adoration of the Magi, 161, 162, 164 Afternoon Rain in Nanjing, 91 Agitprop theatre, 100 Air from the Suite No 3 in D Major, J.S. Bach, 34 Albers, Josef, 157 Alchemical Studies, 154 Alexander Nevsky, 5, 135 Alexandrov, Grigori, 29 Ali, Tariq, 156 All Souls Carnival concert, 63 Also Sprach Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, 111 Also Sprach Zarathustra, Richard Strauss, 36, 50 Altenberg, Peter, 164 Amenhotep III, 38 Amour Perdu, 58 Angelic Conversation, The, 156 Anima Grado, 169 Antheil, George, 72 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 145 Aparajito, 82 Apu Trilogy, the, 82 Apur Sansar, 82 Arabian Nights, The, 137 Aragon, Louis, 145 Aristotle, 13, 108 Arkhipov, Abram, 144 Arquette, Patricia, 16 Artaud, Antonin, 191, 192, 195 Associated Screen News, 185 Association of Documentary Film Producers, 207 Atmospheres, 36, 40, 41 Available Forms, 57

Bach, J.S., 2, 34, 132, 133, 135, 140, 161–164 Bachmann, Gid´eon, 137 Bacon, Francis, 199, 200 Badalamenti, Angelo, 25 Badings, Henk, 56 Balachander, Sundaram, 55 Ballet M´ecanique, 72 Ballet Rambert, 153 Bandopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan, 81 Barna, Yon, 2 Barry Lyndon, 41, 181 Basie, Count, 63 Bass, Saul, 54 Battleship Potemkin, The, 2, 5, 32, 33, 63 Bazin, Andr´e, 207 Beatty, Talley, 78 Beckett, Samuel, 19 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 154, 166 Begone Dull Care, 65 Belafonte, Harry, 12 Belle Cr´eole, La, 63 Belson, Jordan, 56 Berg, Alban, 106 Bergman, Ingmar, 161 Berkeley, Busby, 3, 68–72 Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the, 44 Bernard, Jeffrey, 199 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 132, 145 Bhagavad-Gita, 128 Bicycle Thieves, 81 Birds, The, 31, 33 Blades, Rub´en, 9 Blue Danube, The, 42, 43, 44 Blue, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158 Bogdanovich, Peter, 238, 239 Bose, Nandalal, 81 Boulez, Pierre, 17 Bowie, David, 17, 18, 25, 26 Brahma, 56 Brahms, Johannes, 208

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Brakhage, Stan, 125 Brant, Henry, 63 Braque, Georges, 61, 177 Brassa¨ı, (Gyula Hal´asz), 222 Brecht, Bertolt, 100 Breughel the Elder, Pieter, 144 Brezhnev, Leonid, 145 British Film Institute (BFI), 156 Brown, Earle, 57, 230 Brownian motion, 204 Bugaku, 73 Bu˜nuel, Luis, 16, 144, 207, 208 ‘By a Waterfall’, 71 Cage, John, 121, 178 Cain and Abel, 56 Calder, Alexander, 230 Cambridge University, 156 Campbell, Joseph, 37 Camus, Albert, 1, 2 Cantata (Prokofiev), 135 Cantos, The, 225 Caravaggio, 155, 156 Caravaggio, Michelangelo, 155 Cardiff, Jack, 12 Carnegie Recital Hall, 63 Catalog, 54 Cathars, The, 195 Chambers, Jack, 123–129 Channel 4 television, 156 Chiaureli, Sofiko, 149 Children of Hiroshima, 83 Chion, Michel, 43 Chopin, Fr´ed´eric, 118 Chorus of Lives, 171, 173, 174 Christ, Jesus, 133–136, 138–140, 142, 161, 162 Chroma, 154, 157 Citron, Jack, 54 Civil Rights movement, 233 Clair, Ren´e, 71 Clarke, Arthur C., 35 Clayton, Jack, 24 Clockwork Orange, A, 181 Coleman, Ornette, 54, 63 Colli, Tonino Delli, 138 Collins, Rufus, 220, 221 Colossus the, 226 Colour Box, 62, 63, 65 Colour Flight, 58, 65 Colour of Pomegranates, The, 144, 148 Coltrane, John, 63 COMECON, 143 Composition 1960 No. 7, 121 Concordia University, Montreal, 179 Confession, 145 Conner, Bruce, 120–123, 128 Conrad, Tony, 122 Constable, John, 59 Constantin, Dobre, 67 Coronation Scene, the, 159–161 Coward, Noel, 29

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Crommelynck, Fernand, 62 Crossroads, 120–123, 128 Curnoe, Greg, 124 Dali, Salvador, 73 Dames, 71 Davis, Stuart, 197 Dead Souls, 119 Debussy, Claude, 39 Dench, Judi, 156 Deren, Maya, 73–79 Devi, 82, 83, 86 Devils, The, 153 Dickerson, Ernest, 12 Digital Harmony, 55 Disney, Walt, 65 Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, 77 Do The Right Thing, 5–14 Don Baretto and his Cuban Orchestra, 63 Donati, Danilo, 137 Dovzhenko Film Studios, 143 Dracup, Dennis, 167, 169–175 Dream Play, A, 201 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 137, 138 Drunken Angel, 85 Duccio, di Buoninsegna, 137 Dunham, Katherine, 76 Dwija, 57 Dylan, Bob, 12 Eames, Charles and Ray, 54, 181 Edipo Re (book), 131 Edward II, 156 Einstein, Albert, 181 Eisenstein on the Audiovisual, 3 Eisenstein, Sergei, 2, 3, 5, 7–14, 29, 32, 33, 34, 63, 83, 85, 106, 110, 125, 135, 136, 139, 147, 151, 153, 156, 159–161, 163-165, 179, 220, 233, 234, 235, 239, 240, 243, 248, 249 Elephant Man, The, 24 Empedocles, 167, 168, 169, 174, 195 Empedocles (film), 3, 167–175, 195, 229, 230 Engels, Fr´ıedrich, 159 English National Opera, 153 Eno, Brian, 18, 25, 26 Entr’acte, 71, 72 Eraserhead, 22, 24 Erbame Dich, Mein Gott (Have Pity on Me, My Lord), 138, 140, 161–164 Fang, Professor Qin, 89 Faure, Elie, 165, 166 Fellini, Federico, 37, 132, 144 ‘Fight The Power’, 6 Film Exercises, 52, 53 Filmads, 61, 64 First International Experimental Film Competition, Belgium, 53 Five Spot Caf´e, 63 Flaubert, Gustave, 30 Flowers, Tommy, 226

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Gagaku, 73, 74 Garden, The, 155, 156, 157 Gauguin, Paul, 61 Geldof, Bob, 155 G´ericault, Th´eodore, 154 Ginsberg, Allen, 63, 136 Giselle, 149 Gladstone, Gerald, 244 Gleeson, Patrick, 121, 122 Godard, Jean-Luc, 144 Gogol, Nikolai, 119 Gold Diggers of 1933, 68, 69, 72 Gold Diggers of 1935, 71, 72 Goldwyn, Sam, 71 Gorky, Maxim, 118 Gospel According to Matthew, The, 132–142 GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit, 58, 63, 65 Graves, Robert, 62 Grieg, Edvard, 97 Grierson, John, 58, 63, 65 Griffith, D.W., 109 Grosz, George, 99, 100, 105, 107, 238 Guggenheim Fellowship, 53, 76 Haazen, Father Guido, 137 Hamilton, Patrick, 107, 111 Hammid, Alexander, 73, 75, 76 Harry Potter, 95 Hart of London, The, 123–129 Hayasaka, Fumio, 85 Hayashi, Hikaru, 84 Hebrides Overture, The, 58 Henry-Christophe, King, 220 Heraclitus, 168 Hero with a Thousand Faces, The, 37 Herzog, Werner, 33–34 Hitchcock, Alfred, 16, 31–33, 54, 63, 95, 107–116 Hitler, Adolf, 101, 106, 160 Hockney, David, 180 Hoffman, John, 58 Honolulu Blues, 59 Hurdes, Las (Land Without Bread), 207 I’m Deranged, 17, 18, 25 IBM, 54, 70 Ibsen, Henrik, 97 Ikebana, 162 Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (book), 131

Imagining October, 156 In the Hall of the Mountain King, 97 Innocents, The, 24 Interaction of Color, 157, 158 International Blue, 158 International Surrealist Exhibition, 63 Invisible City, 193, 195, 196, 223 Irazoqui, Enrique, 136 Ito, Teiji, 73–78 Ivan the Terrible, 5 Ivan the Terrible, Part 1, 159–161 Ivan the Terrible, Tsar, 160, 161 Ives, Charles, 9

INDEX

Footlight Parade, 71 Ford, John, 2, 86, 95 Fourth Symphony ( Johannes Brahms), 208 France Musique, 36 Francesca, Piero della, 137 Franck, C´esar, 39 Franklin, Aretha 12 Free Radicals, 61, 64, 68 Freud, Sigmund, 2, 61 From a Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumaras, 191, 192

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James, Henry, 24 Jarman, Derek, 153–158 Joan of Arc, 137, 138 John XXIII, Pope, 134 Johnson, James Weldon, 233 Johnson, John Rosamund, 233 Josephson, Erland, 161 Joyce, James, 2, 89, 125, 126 Jubilee, 155 Jung, Carl, 154, 156 Kabuki, 75, 87 Kael, Pauline, 37 Kaleidoscope, 65 Kali, 82 Kalle, Pepe, 58 Karajan, Herbert von, 44 Katchaturian, Aram, 146 Kearns, George, 225 Kennedy, John F. 120 Kerouac, Jack, 63, 136 Keyboard Studies No. 2, 122 Keyboard Studies No. 7, 122 Khan, Ali Akbar, 82 King, Martin Luther, 10 King Ubu, 77 King’s College London, 153 Kingdom, The, 195, 220, 221 Kleiman, Naum, 2 Klein, Yves, 158 Kodo Drummers ensemble, 84 Kooning, Willem de, 63 Kubrick, Stanley, 24, 25, 27, 35–38, 41–50, 54, 180, 181, 199, 200, 201, 207 Kurosawa, Akira, 85–87, 235 Lambart, Evelyn, 65 Land of Silence and Darkness, 33–34 Lang, Fritz, 95–107, 113, 116, 207 Lapis, 57 Last of England, The, 155, 156 Lean, David, 29–31 Lecuona Cuban Boys, the, 59 Lee, Bill, 12 Lee, Spike, 5–14 Legend of the Surami Fortress, The, 145–151, 155 L´eger, Fernand, 72

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Leibowitz, Ren´e, 52 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 117, 118, 120, 123, 128 Lermontov, Mikhail, 145 Letters to a Young Poet, 181 Lift Every Voice and Sing, 233 Ligeti, Gy¨orgy, 17, 36, 38, 40, 42, 178 Lightman, Alan, 181 Lipizzaner Spanish Riding School, the, 148 Lisson Gallery, 153 Literati artists, 90 Little Review, The, 62 Living Newspaper theatre, 100 Living Theatre, the, 41, 77, 220 Lockheed Aircraft, 53 London Film Society, the, 62 London Film-makers’ Co-op (London, UK), 154 London Filmmakers’ Cooperative (London, Western Ontario), 124 Longhi, Roberto, 134, 137 Lorre, Peter, 106, 107 Lost Highway, 15–28, 75 ‘Lullaby of Broadway’, 71, 72 Lutoslawski, Witold, 17, 40, 178 Lye, Len, 58–65, 68, 70, 71, 72 Lynch, David, 15–28, 75 Lynn, Chris H., 89–93 M, 95–107, 113, 116 Macbeth, 86, 87 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 20 Magdalene, Mary, 133 Magnanimous Cuckold, The, 62 Mahler, Gustav, 39, 235 Malina, Judith, 41 Mamma Roma (book), 131 Mamma Roma (film), 132 Manailo, Fedor, 144 Manchester University, 156 Manet, Edouard, 165 Mantegna, Andrea, 137 March of Time, The, 63 Marche fun´ebre, 118 Marey, Jules Etienne, 72 Masonic Funeral Music (Mozart), 135 Mass in B Minor, 137 Matisse, Henri, 61, 154 Matrix II and III, 55 Matthew the apostle, 133, 141 McGill, James, 186, 187 McLaren, Norman, 65, 67, 68, 71, 72 Medea, 37, 149 Meditation on Violence, 77 Meijiza Theatre, 87 Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, 179 Melford, George, 208 Melville, Herman, 2 Memnon, statue of Ethiopian king, 38 Mendelssohn, Felix, 43, 58 Meshes of the Afternoon, 73–78 Messiaen, Olivier, 166 Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, 78

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Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 12, 13, 62, 164 Mgoyan, Yuri, 145 Michaux, Henri, 222 Mikava, Major, 143 Milhaud, Darius, 63 Mir´o, Joan, 63 Missa Luba, The, 133, 137 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 83 Monk, Thelonius, 63 Moods of the Sea, 58 Moondrum series, 55 Morandi, Giorgio, 199 Morning Fisherman, 89–91, 93 Moscow Film Festival, the, 84 Mother and Son, 164–166 Motherless Child, 133 Mountain of Signs, The, 191, 192 Mouvement Perpetuel No 1, 113, 114, 115 Moyibi, 58 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 132, 166 M¨ude Tod, Der, 116 Mukherjee, Benode Behari, 81 Murnau, F.W., 116 Murphy, Dudley, 72 Naked Island, 84 Nesterov, Mikhail, 144 New York Herald Tribune, 63, 64 New York Times, 63 Nicholson, Ben, 62 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 111, 162 Ninth Duino Elegy, 201, 202 Ninth Symphony (Beethoven), 154 Nitoslawska, Marielle, Professor, 179 No Trouble, 62 Noh theatre, 84, 85, 86, 87 Nolde, Emil, 200, 201 North, Alex, 49 Notes on Filmmaking, 85 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), 159 Nyboma, Mwandido, 58 Nyquist, Sven, 161, 163 O’Hara, Frank, 63 O’Keefe, Georgia, 63 October, 156 Odessa Steps sequence, the, 32, 33 Oedipus Rex, 37, 149 Onibaba, 84, 85, 87 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 128 Oscar Peterson Trio, 65 Oserake and The River That Walks, 3, 178–180, 182–206, 208, 209, 218–220, 223–226, 230, 231 Paradjanov Museum (Yerevan), the, 146 Paradjanov, Sergei, 131, 142–152, 155 Paradjanov, Suren, 143, Parker, Charlie, 63 Parmenides, 168

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Que viva Mexico!, 147, 165 Rabelaisdada (play), 221 Radio France, 36 Rainbow Dance, 67 Rainbow in Curved Air, 55 Rammstein, 25 Ran, 235 Ray, Man, 71, 72 Ray, Satyajit, 2, 81–83, 86, 87 Reconstructing Scenic Views of Nanjing, 89 Red Nichols and his Five Pennies, 59 Reed, Jerry, 55 Reed, Lou, 26 Reinhardt, Ad, 197, 198 Reinhardt, Max, 106 Remarks on Colour, 154 Renoir, Jean, 2, 81, 86 Report, 120 Requiem (Gy¨orgy Ligeti), 36, 38, 40 Resnais, Alain, 144 Return to Tipasa, 1, 2 Ricercare (J.S. Bach), 135 Richter, Hans, 63 Ridenhour, Carlton Douglas (Chuck D), 233 Riding, Laura, 62 Riley, Terry, 55, 122, 128 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 181, 201, 202 Rimbaud, Arthur, 173

Ring of the Nibelungs, The, 118 River, The, 81 Rivers, Larry, 63 Robertson, Claudette, 196, 223, 231, 244 Rodley, Chris, 21–23 Rome, Open City, 201 Rope, 95, 107–116 Rorschach, Hermann, 91, 146, 192 Rossellini, Roberto, 132, 144, 201 Rouault, Georges, 136 Royal Ballet, the, 153 Rumba Negra, 59 Russell, Bertrand, 156 Russell, Ken, 153, Russian Orthodox choral music, 133, 159, 160

INDEX

Pas de Deux, 67, 68, 69, 72 Pasolini, Guido, 131 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 3, 37, 131–142, 144, 149, 151 Passion of Joan of Arc, The, 137, 138 Pather Pancheli, 81, 82 Peer Gynt, 97, 99, 103 Penderecki, Krzysztof, 17, 25, 35, 36, 40, 178 People’s Park Reverie, 93 Permutations, 54, 55 Pet Shop Boys, the, 155 Peterson, Oscar, 65 Picasso, Pablo, 61, 222 Pierrot Lunaire, 106 Pinter, Harold, 19 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 2 Piscator, Erwin, 41, 100 Planet of the Apes, 38 Poe, Edgar Allan, 15 Polish National Film School, Lodz, 179 Pollock, Jackson, 63, 194 Pomus, Doc, 26 Popova, Lyubov, 62 Porter, Edwin S., 109 Poulenc, Francis, 113, 114, 115 Pound, Ezra, 225 Pran Nath, Pandit, 122 Prokofiev, Sergei, 133, 135, 160 Proust, Marcel, 125 Public Enemy, 6, 233 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 29

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Saarinen, Eero, 190 Sacrifice, The, 161–164 Salerno, Enrico Maria, 138 Salome, 107 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 139 Satyricon, 37 Savage Messiah, 153 Sayat Nova, 144, 148, 149 Scarlatti, Domenico, 67, 68 Scherbatyuk, Svetlana, 143 Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 43, 49 Schoenberg, Arnold, 25, 39, 53, 54, 106, 107 Schola Cantorum, 207 Schopenhauer, Friedrich 10 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 95 Sebastian, Saint, 155 Sebastiane, 155 Secret Agent, The, 63 Seizin Press, the, 62 Serayeva, Nigyar, 143 Seven and Five, 62 Seven Sermons to the Dead, The, 154 Sex Pistols, the, 155 ‘Shadow Waltz’, 68 Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, 144, 147 Shakespeare, William, 156 Shankar, Ravi, 57, 82 Shindo, Kaneto, 83–85, 87 Shining, The, 24, 25, 27 Shuman, Mort, 26 Sica, Vittorio de, 81, 132 Silence, 121 Simon and Garfunkel, 12 Sinfonia Antartica, 49 Sixteen Views of Nanjing, 90 Slade School of Art, 153 Smith, David, 63, 197 Smith, G.A., 109 Smith, Patti, 155 Smiths, The, 155 Socrates, 168 Sokurov, Alexander, 164–166 Soto, Masaru, 86 Spirals, 55 Spiritual Voices, 166

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St Matthew Passion, 133, 137, 138, 140, 161–164 Stack, Oswald, 134 Stalin, Josef, 117, 118, 151, 160 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 149 Star Gate sequence, 54 Statement on Sound, 29 Stevens, Cat, 12 Stewart, James, 107, 108 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 17, 40, 121, 178, 230 Storaro, Vittorio, 12 Strauss, Johann, 42 Strauss, Richard, 36, 37,107 Stravinsky, Igor, 39, 63 Strike, The, 10, 165 Strindberg, August, 201, 225, 226 Study in Choreography for Camera, 78 Symphony of the Donbass (Enthusiasm), 117 Synchromy, 65 Tagore, Rabindranath, 81 Taillibert, Roger, 190 Takemitsu, Toru, 235 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 145, 161–164 Tate Gallery, 153, 180, 199 Tati, Jacques, 144 Tbilisi Conservatoire, 143 Teorema (book), 131 Thalberg, Irving, 96 That Obscure Object of Desire, 16 The Holiday Over . . . , 132 Th´eaˆ tre et son double, Le, 195 Theatre of Eternal Music, The, 122 This Happy Breed, 29–31 ‘This Magic Moment’, 26 Thomas, Dylan, 63 Three Songs of Lenin, 117–120, 123, 128, 129 Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 199 Throbbing Gristle, 155 Throne of Blood, 86, 87 Time Magazine, 62 Toro, Benicio del, 84 Totem and Taboo, 61 Trade Tattoo, 65 Trotsky, Leon, 118 Truffaut, Franc¸ois, 107, 144 Trumbull, Douglas, 54 Tudor, Antony, 78 Turing, Alan, 226 Turn of the Screw, The, 24 Turner, Simon Fisher, 155, 156 Tusalava, 62, 71 Twilight of the Gods, 118, 119

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UFA (Universum Film AG), 116 Ulysses, 89, 125, 126 United Folk Orchestra Romania, 67 Universal Studios, 233 Varda, Agn´es, 144 Var´ese, Edgard, 121, 178 Variations on a Circle, 53 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 49 Vertigo, 16, 54 Vertov, Dziga, 117–120, 123,128, 129 Very Eye of Night, The, 78 VGIK (Moscow Film School), 143 Viking, The, 208 Vinci, Leonardo da, 51, 52, 58, 71, 72, 161, 162, 164, 215, 216, 217 Visconti, Luchino, 144 Vivaldi, Antonio, 132 Vorkapich, Slavko, 58 Wagner, Richard, 9, 118, 119, 123, 128 Webern, Anton von, 133, 135 Welles, Orson, 2 White, Minor, 224, 225 Whitney-Reed Radius-Differential Theta Differential, 55 Whitney, James, 52, 53, 55–58, 68, 70, 71 Whitney, John, 52–55, 57, 58, 68, 70, 71, 72 Who I am, 132 William Wilson, 15 Williams, John, 95 Winett, Cherel, 77 Without Words, 129 Wittgenstein, 156, 157 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 154, 156, 157 Wozzeck, 106, 107 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 39, 40, 41, 178, 223 Wu Ming, 57, 71 X, Malcolm, 10 Xenakis, Iannis, 17, 35, 36, 178 Yamamoto, Kajiro, 85 Yantra, 55, 56 Yerevan Film Studios, 144 Yevtushenko, Yevgeni, 136 Yoruba, 64 Young, La Monte, 121, 122 Yutkevich, Sergei, 144 Zapruder, Abraham, 120 Zielstra, Jan, 56 Zone System, the, 225