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
by Richard Misek In 1970, experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka designed a cinema auditorium for Anthology Film Archives in New York, in which ‘shell-like’ seats and reams of black velvet caused all but the screen to disappear into darkness.[1] He referred to his Invisible Cinema as ‘a machine for viewing’.[2] Though the movie theatre is now […]
by Evelyn Kreutzer In this audiovisual study, I look at music-performative gestures of ‘fetishisation’. Against the backdrop of the mid-century celebrity conductor figure, as well as larger historical discourses around mediated music consumption, I focus on two conductors in two films, which draw on the same musical composition: Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and Hugo Niebling’s Pastorale […]
by Tracy Cox-Stanton voiceover transcript 1 writing parts and wholes In the essay film, like the video essay, words are not just ideas. They’re also sounds and images. When an essay film examines its object, words often fade away completely, supplanted by the complex signifying landscape of mise en scène. The video essay, like the […]
by A Zinsel Author A Zinsel is a recent graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, MA program in cinema studies, specialising in audiovisual techniques. Her research focuses on the status of the cinematic image in the digital environment, aided by the use of non-linear editing software and collaborative scholarly practice.
by Tracy Cox-Stanton Reflecting on her audiovisual study of a dance sequence in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Laura Mulvey notes that ‘digitally derived “delayed cinema” [has] a special, privileged relationship to cinematic gesture’.[1] Building upon her arguments in Death Twenty-four Times a Second,[2] Mulvey discusses how digital editing tools enable the film scholar to fragment a […]
by Jason Mittell As Black Lives Matter activists pushed the issue of police violence against African-American citizens onto the broad public agenda in the summer of 2014, my mind turned to The Wire. I had watched the landmark HBO series five times, written a fair amount about it, and taught courses about the series, which […]
by Angelo Restivo To begin with, I would want to stress that in this video – which juxtaposes images from the television series Breaking Bad with scenes from the archive of surrealist filmmaking – I am decidedly not claiming that these resonances and rhymes were intentional citations by the production team of the television series. […]
We would like to thank the following institutions for their support:
Online
The online version of NECSUS is published in Open Access and all issue contents are free and accessible to the public.
Download
The online repository media/rep/ provides PDF downloads to aid referencing. Volumes are also indexed in the DOAJ. Please consider the environmental costs of printing versus reading online.
Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot
Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade
Malte Hagener
Philipps-University Marburg
Skadi Loist
Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Francesco Pitassio
University of Udine
Belén Vidal
King’s College London