The Visual Music Film

Aimee Mollaghan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137492814
• eBook ISBN: 9781137492821
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, The Visual Music Film explores the concept and expression of musicality in the visual music film, in which visual presentations are given musical attributes such as rhythmical form, structure and harmony.

1

Questions of Attribution and Contribution: What Constitutes a Visual Music Film?

Unlike some other forms of avant-garde film, on which one can consult volumes, the subject of visual music in experimental cinema has been under-represented in film history as a distinct category. As visual music draws on two distinct disciplines, film and music, it is intrinsically hybrid in nature. Its historical antecedence as a hybrid art form has therefore given rise to ambiguity surrounding it taxonomy. This is not unlike the problems of ‘attribution’¹⁵ and ‘contribution’¹⁶ that Thomas Elsaesser points out in relation to research on Dada cinema. Elsaesser asserts that the ambiguity surrounding what constitutes a Dada film is problematic, because the makers of Dada films often aligned themselves with movements other than Dada. For example, Fernand Léger was generally considered to be a Cubist painter, yet his film Ballet Méchanique (1924) was considered to be inherently Dadaist by Hans Richter.¹⁷ In the same fashion, Anémic Cinema (1926) by Marcel Duchamp is also referred to as a Dada film in spite of Duchamp’s protestations that it was not a film at all but an element of his motorised sculptures that he referred to as ‘precision optics’.¹⁸

Another problem that arose for those attempting to create a cohesive theory of Dada cinema was the sheer diversity in visual aesthetics and, to a certain extent, ideological concerns within the body of films. Hans Richter’s series of Rhythmus films, with their hard-edged abstract images, are clearly very different to René Clair’s notionally Dadaist film Entr’acte (1923), which subverts traditional notions of narrative cinema by virtue of parodying bourgeois concerns such as the high art form of ballet or the solemnity of the funeral. Yet authors such as Malcolm Turvey have made a convincing case as to why both of these films have equally valid claims to the title of Dada.¹⁹ While I do not wish to focus on Dadaism per se, the discourse surrounding what exactly comprises a Dada cinema is a useful point of departure for the problems of defining visual music as a distinct body of work.

The visual music film shares many of the same problems of attribution and contribution suffered by Dada films. Should one resist calling Rhythmus 21 (1921–24) by Richter a visual music film because Turvey and indeed Richter himself have made a case for it as an exemplar of Dada, or can it be appropriated as a work of visual music film by virtue of its musicality? The boundaries between different types of experimental cinema, whether they be absolute, Dadaist, poetic, structuralist or post-structuralist, are salient but not immovable. Cinematic work can diffuse across the semi-permeable membranes of classification to be consumed by another cell of the avant-garde ripe for reclassification. Perhaps an apt metaphor for what I am attempting to do with this book is provided by the concept of endocytosis, with the category of visual music functioning as a roving cell absorbing works from other disciplines by engulfing them in order to create a new, discrete form of film replete with hybrid characteristics.

Bearing in mind this problem of contribution and attribution that exists in relation to the visual music film and the problems relating to its existence as a hybrid entity, at its most basic level formed from music and the moving image, it is not surprising that visual music like, for example, film noir has, as a distinct category, developed retrospectively. The majority of the films that I am examining as works of visual music were not necessarily conceived as such or as part of a formal movement, even though the desire to represent or capture the essence of music may have been the driving force behind the work. Apart from the recent references to the films often described as visual music in the wake of a renewed vogue for synaesthesia, a neurological condition in which senses are cross-modally stimulated, in the arts visual music films have generally turned up in histories of avant-garde cinema, experimental or abstract film by authors such as A. L. Rees, David Curtis, P. Adams Sitney and Malcolm Le Grice. The focus of these accounts tends to sever the examples from their musical connections and to appropriate them as the roots of a tradition of either graphic or structuralist cinema.

Bearing this in mind, this chapter will provide an overview of the work and debates primary to the interdisciplinary methodology of this book and establish a framework for examining the aesthetics of the visual music film by means of a musical paradigm. Due to the hybrid nature of the body of work under consideration, rather than surveying the key literature by discipline (for example, art history, film theory, musicology or philosophy) or even chronologically, I have organised the discourse surrounding the visual music film according to key concepts that I have identified as prominent across the existing body of relevant literature. I am therefore drawing on related material from various disciplines in order to conduct a comparative study of discussions of the visual music film that identifies productive convergences and divergences in the existing literature.

The first area of debate that I will address is the discourse around the idea of the musical analogy that underpins the visual music film. This section will pay special attention to particular ways in which the analogy has been adapted to create models of visual music rooted in the concepts of synaesthesia and hybridity. The second significant issue that I will examine in this chapter is the historical positioning of visual music as an extension of painting. This idea, espoused in literature by authors such as Standish Lawder, Le Grice, P. Sitney, Robert Bruce Rodgers and Lorettann Gasgard Devlin, grounds the visual music film as a motion painting. It is here that I will examine both the validity and limitations of this approach that, in general, severs the visual of the visual music text from its musical origins. Finally, I will draw on the issues raised during my investigation into the musical analogy and assert the need for a comprehensive study of the formal aspects of the visual music film’s unique synthesis of film, art and music through textual analysis. To reinforce this need for a new reading of these films, I will provide a close reading of Symphonie Diagonale by Viking Eggeling as an example of the type of analysis that I consider to be lacking in existing discussions of the visual music film.

The musical analogy

The words visual and music in the title of this book alert its audience to its musical foundation from the outset. It is no surprise, therefore, that the musical analogy has served as an entry point for those who wish to discuss or understand this body of work. This analogy is not unique to the visual music film. Two dominant models can be discerned in relation to the musical analogy in the visual music film and, by extension, the arts. The first is predicated on the idea of inter-sensory correspondences, or synaesthesia, and the other is based on the idea of visual music as a hybrid art form but both have, at their roots, the idea of a musical analogy.

It is difficult to engage with the concept of visual music without considering the debates around the psychological phenomenon of synaesthesia. One rarely reads contemporary texts about visual music without mention of the term. Psychologists John E. Harrison and Simon Baron-Cohen state:

We, along with others (Vernon 1930; Marks 1975; Cytowic 1989, 1993; Motluk 1994), define synaesthesia as occurring when stimulation of one sensory modality automatically triggers a perception in a second modality, in the absence of any direct stimulation to this second modality.²⁰

In Synaesthesia: An Introduction, they identify and place in categories various types of synaesthesia. They demarcate developmental synaesthesia as idiopathic, or arising from an unknown cause, in order to distinguish it from acquired synaesthesia and pseudosynaesthesia. The main characteristics that they set out are that it has a childhood onset, it is unrelated to hallucination or psychotic visions, it differs from images constructed in the imagination, it cannot be attributed to drug use and it is not something that is learned by the sufferer.²¹ Another form of synaesthesia marked out by Harrison and Baron-Cohen and also Laurence Marks is synaesthesia induced through hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, mescaline or magic mushrooms. This drug-induced confusion between sensory modes bears some resemblance to the imagery intrinsic in the visual music films of West Coast filmmaker Jordan Belson, specifically in the nebulous colour diffusions that seem to reach out beyond the screen and wrap themselves around the most primitive areas of our consciousness.

Pseudosynaesthesia by association is the third form to which they draw attention. This is a form of acquired synaesthesia in which individuals have learned to make associations between words or letters with colours. They speculate that this form can be attributed to the way that children learn to read from alphabet books in which each letter is assigned a specific colour. The final and most significant form of synaesthesia pertaining to my discussion of the visual music film is that of metaphor as pseudosynaesthesia. In many of the visual music films under consideration in this book, such as those by Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren, the audiovisual relationship is functioning not as direct translation of sound into image but as an allegory or correspondence. For example, in his notes for Synchromy (1971), McLaren, who was a purported synaesthete,²² notes that the colour–sound associations he uses are pseudo-/culturally synaesthetic associations. The pianissimo (very quiet) notes are represented by soft muted hues while the loud fortissimo notes are represented in vibrant, contrasting shades of colour.²³ The term synaesthesia has therefore become something of a popular malapropism in relation to the visual music film.

Simon Shaw-Miller, nonetheless, posits that he finds the concept of synaesthesia to be helpful when considering the relationship between image and sound as it draws attention to the, often involuntary, relationship that these senses enjoy. He predominantly draws on the idea of synaesthesia in order to create a link between the senses of sight and sound. Just as Shaw-Miller makes clear his decision to use the idea of pseudosynaesthesia ‘without qualification’²⁴ in his book Eye hEar the Visual in Music, I too wish to appropriate Harrison and Baron-Cohen’s concept when approaching the visual music film.

The model of visual music as a hybrid art form is the second dominant model under which the musical analogy has been exploited by the visual music film. Although I asserted that two dominant models exist in relation to the visual music film, synaesthesia and hybrid, these models are not mutually exclusive, and indeed boundaries between both categories are mutable. Central to this idea of visual music as a hybrid form is the idea of gesamtkunstwerk or the total artwork. Although widely attributed to German composer Richard Wagner, the idea of gesamtkunstwerk was not actually his. In fact, the initial concept of gesamtkunstwerk had little to do with musical theatre. Gesamtkunstwerk in its initial formulation was one of total unified artwork, a complete synthesis of art. Under Wagner’s dispersal of the idea, specifically in relation to the music-drama of opera, it came to symbolise a mutual interaction between art forms. The arts were combined rather than fused to enhance the power of the overarching work.

As Shaw-Miller points out, Wagner’s concept of the gesamtkunstwerk is commonly referred to as the ‘end of art’. By this, Wagner meant that the arts have essentially reached their individual limits of development. This means that in isolation they cannot reach their potential and must resort to unification in order to reach maturity. Shaw-Miller also contends that it is not sufficient to merely compare the media that constitute a hybrid work. As I make reference to in relation to the work of Sergei Eisenstein and Michel Chion later in this chapter, he holds that any fashion of hybridity that is the result of two or more areas of practice coming together needs to be recognised as producing something that is ‘often more than the sum of its parts’.²⁵

Jerrold Levinson, like Shaw-Miller, also contends that hybrid status is primarily a historical construct. It is not enough to merely append two or more media together to form a hybrid. He instead asserts, ‘In short, hybrid art forms are art forms arising from the actual combination or interpenetration of earlier art forms.’²⁶ If works are therefore to be understood as true hybrids, they must ‘be understood in terms of and in light of their components’.²⁷ He advocates that these works be subject to a historically informed analysis rather than one grounded in individual material, which is broadly the approach that this book takes in its consideration of the visual music film. As he posits,

In synthesis or fusion the objects or products of two (or more) arts are brought together in such a way that the individual components to some extent lose their original identities and are present in the hybrid in a form significantly different from that assumed in the pure state.²⁸

Not all theorists are positive about an audiovisual culture that attempts to fuse or marry imagery to music. Drawing on composer Pierre Schaeffer’s controversial argument from the late 1940s intimating that records and radio can subvert the dominance of vision by allowing us to experience sound as an ontological and aesthetic entity in its own right, Christoph Cox notes that in recent times a new culture has materialised that re-evaluates ‘the senses and their traditional hierarchy’,²⁹ particularly the dominant privileging of the visual over the auditory. While it is this new culture that has presumably led to the reassessment of the visual music film as a distinct body of work, Cox argues that by combining the visual and aural, artists/musicians/filmmakers are offering ‘an aesthetic appropriation [of] synaesthesia’³⁰ that diminishes the value of sound as an independent entity. He perceives this as a strategy for retaining sound’s dependence on vision, an artistic choice that he finds detrimental to the pursuit of a true art of sound. Despite the fact that this book does not focus on the investigation of an independent sound art per se and Cox is expressly referring to a contemporary culture, his argument still holds true for the evaluation of the early visual music films emerging in a period so bound up in ideas of medium specificity by modern artists such as Piet Mondrian and art critics such as Clement Greenberg. Cox’s discussion of the dominance of the visual in synaesthetic art is, therefore, a useful starting point when attempting to discuss visual music as hybrid audiovisual form.

As Cox points out, Friedrich Nietzsche was insistent that sound and vision should be confined to separate distinct realms with the relationship between them being considered only through the discourse of metap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Questions of Attribution and Contribution: What Constitutes a Visual Music Film?
• 2. The Formal Absolute in the Visual Music Film
• 3. The Spiritual Absolute in the Visual Music Film
• 4. Experimentation and Technological Innovation
• 5. Conceptions of Harmony in the Work of John Whitney
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index