The audiovisual essay has been conventionally associated with the subjective and the personal. On the other hand, this introduction makes a case for the adoption of an ‘impersonal’ voice or viewpoint as a tactical response to the overvaluation of the self that pervades our current media economy.
by Domietta Torlasco Glass, stones, water, steel: the body remembers the time of things in this short film about the Italian Alps and the almost obsessive walking habits of those who live there; along the way, unpredictable alliances are formed. Author Domietta Torlasco is a filmmaker and critical theorist. She is the author of three […]
by Sara Fgaier A woman narrates the script of Gli anni, a few pieces picked up on the shores of a timeless Sardinia. Neither the words nor the images claim to tell the whole of its story: the places of the past emerge as reverberations of a fragmentary and shifting memory, bathed in a new […]
by Maha Maamoun Postcards of Egypt’s prime historical and touristic monument, the Pyramids of Giza, are flipped through to a soundtrack composed from dialogues occurring by the pyramids and sampled from a variety of Egyptian films. Author Maha Maamoun is an Egyptian visual artist and curator based in Cairo. Her videos and photographs address the form […]
by Deborah Stratman Obscure signs portend a looming, indecipherable slump. An oracular decoding of the landscape. Author Deborah Stratman makes films and artworks that question power, control and belief, considering how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool, and time to be supernatural. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, […]
by Cauleen Smith Earth sings a melancholic tale of disappointment. Folk fail to listen until it’s too late. We End. Structured like a blues song with a live-improvised electro-organic soundtrack. Author Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is rooted within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and […]
by Catherine Grant …the image of musical sound itself becomes contagious…[1] Irresistible Instrumentalism, the video essay embedded above, explores the somewhat paradoxical depiction in early cinema of the visible playing by onscreen musicians of music that makes no sound in the world beyond the film’s diegesis – the portrayal of music, in other words, that […]
by Liz Greene In 2013, two films were released that speak to each other via a radio conversation, Alfonso Cuarón’s feature length space adventure Gravity, and Jonás Cuarón’s short film Aningaaq. Both father and son, Alfonso and Jonás Cuarón, wrote the screenplay for Gravity, and while in the process of the film’s production Jonás made […]
by Johannes Binotto The coupling of optics and acoustics in cinema is never a natural given, but always a construction dependent on technological intervention. As we all know, moving image and sound recording, although both already invented, failed for a long time to come together because they lacked synchronicity. Attempts to run a gramophone record […]
by Ian Garwood ‘The Place of the Pop Song in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism’ contributes to a discussion about the use of the pop song in the scholarly audiovisual essay, an area of videographic practice that has inspired scant self-reflection to date. The video operates in an explanatory mode, so I will allow […]
by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye One impulse, as we began to think about collaborating on this project, was to explore some of the potential of binaural sound in an audiovisual essay. This coalesced with our love of Max Ophuls’ movies, and with previous work on Le Plaisir, to suggest an essay in which voices […]
by Liz Greene This is the second part of a curated two-part audiovisual section on sound and music for NECSUS. The first section contained four audiovisual essays that centred on dialogue, music, and effects and was published in Autumn 2020. This second part (in the main) addresses theory, history, and practice in film sound and […]
by Jaap Kooijman and Patricia Pisters ‘Transparency no longer seems like the bottom of the mirror in which Western humanity reflected the world in its own image. There is opacity now at the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations, silt that is fertile but, in actual fact, indistinct and unexplored even […]
This first part of a two-part issue on sound and music in the audiovisual essay considers the contribution of discrete areas of sound and music to film. Presenting these different approaches to researching sound and music provides an opportunity to collectively investigate the integrated soundtrack.
by Liz Greene ‘The Elephant Man’s Sound, Tracked’ sets out to investigate the clean-up of a line of dialogue, ‘I am not an animal, I am a human being, a man, a man’, in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), and explores the possibility of an alternate soundtrack or even picture edit being cut for […]
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Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot
Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade
Judith Keilbach
Universiteit Utrecht
Skadi Loist
Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Belén Vidal
King’s College London
Andrea Virginás
Sapientia University