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 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 […]
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of desktop documentaries is their affordance of making and presenting a video at the same time: i.e., collapsing boundaries between revealing their thinking and tinkering research process (as unfolding, step-by-step, in front of our eyes) and the presentation of the outcomes of such ‘t(h)inkering’ (arriving at results and, thereby, justifying the presented research methods). They are ‘exploratory’ and ‘explanatorily argumentative’ in one. There is a particular effect that emerges from such transparent, credible, and effortless performativity – a relaxed and seemingly spontaneous presentation of an unfolding argument in an environment (software on desktop) and through methods (typing, dragging, opening files) that is familiar and rather natural to all viewers. In this paper, I aim to take a closer look at these fundamental qualities – ‘transparency’, ‘credibility’, ‘effortlessness’, and ‘performativity’ – respectively, and reveal their distinct as well as joint effects, ultimately resulting in what I will call, ‘artist(ic) emotions’.
Methodologies for teaching audiovisual essays often map the discipline-specific objectives of the form and the practical and philosophical advantages it offers as a mode of assessment. However, a particular division has emerged between the kind of work created by students and the professional audiovisual criticism circulated by critics and scholars that is considered exemplary of contemporary practice. In this context, the role of the author as a self-reflexive agent can be seen as a link not only between students’ expectations of traditional written assessment and the fundamentally different imperatives of the audiovisual essay as a subjective mode of creative research, but also between audiovisual essay criticism and historical iterations of the essay form. This article explores the extensive redevelopment of a capstone undergraduate subject on audiovisual film criticism, undertaken via a fellowship awarded to develop teaching innovation and enhance curriculum design. We detail major pedagogical interventions, including a return to writing, examine key motivations in the development of course content, and establish the critical significance of encouraging students to think of themselves as authors – that is, to consider their own agency in the ways they encounter, interpret, and utilise images. Reflecting on some outcomes of the redeveloped subject, we pose it as a test case for a pedagogy that encourages students to think ambitiously with images, dissolving divisions between professional audiovisual criticism and audiovisual essays as a method of assessment. We argue that when thinking with images in this manner is embraced as a component of pedagogical methodology, students’ competencies with images can be leveraged to enable work that is academically rigorous, critically sophisticated, and evinces highly subjective authorial agency.
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