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 […]
by Jaap Kooijman Talking Heads About Whitney from Jaap Kooijman on Vimeo. Although about Whitney Houston, this audiovisual essay does not contain any image or sound of the late superstar singer who was defined by her voice.[1] Instead, I have compiled the talking head interviews with Houston’s family members, friends, and business associates from two […]
In this audiovisual essay I suggest that film soundtracks might be best considered a ‘soundscape’ as defined by R. Murray Schafer in his book The Soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world (1993). Schafer established The World Soundscape Project in the late 1960s out of a growing concern for the rapidly changing […]
by Oswald Iten George was big and easy-going, but he worked very hard and produced a seemingly endless string of fresh melodies and haunting scores. – Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life When it comes to Disney music, and The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1967) in particular, most people […]
by Richard Misek
by Oscar Raby
by Charlie Shackleton
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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