SEEING SOUND: LIGHTNING STRIKES THE OPTIC NERVE
Wednesday 17 October 2001, at 7:30pm
London Barbican Cinema

ORNAMENT SOUND
Oskar Fischinger, Germany, 1932, b/w, sound, 7 min
‘You ear what you see, you see what you ear’. Indeed, on the left side of the image, unravelling vertically, is the synchronised drawing of the sound wave that is heard. Along the drawing of these sound waves moving small rectangles with appear each new sound level, indicating the height of the note produced in conventional notation, for example C#4 for ‘Do #’ in the fourth octave on the piano. Tönnende Ornamente thus presents the spectral range of the synthetic sound to us. At the beginning of film a falling scale explores the low register, followed by a perambulation of an octave in the acute part of the sound spectrum. Fischinger also presents the various stamps and types of attack which one can obtain with the optical sounds. (Philippe Langlois)

DOTS (POINTS)
Norman McLaren, Dots (Points), Canada, 1948, colour, sound, 3 min
This film of geometric abstractions drawn directly on the film with pen and ink was made independently by McLaren. Exploring the synchronisation of the visuals with a synthetic soundtrack, McLaren drew a percussive rhythm of clicking sounds along the edge of the film. The soundtrack reveals how early in his career McLaren achieved a sophistication in the use of this method. The music ranges over several octaves, integrating perfectly with the moving blue and white dots that flip across the screen on a red background. (Maynard Collins)

SOUNDTRACK
Barry Spinello, Soundtrack, USA, 1969, b/w & colour, sound, 10 min
John Cage wrote, in 1938, of a “new electronic music” to be developed out of the photoelectric cell optical-sound process used in films. Any image – his example is a picture of Beethoven – or mark on the soundtrack, successively repeated, will produce a distinct pitch and timbre. This new music, he said, would be built along the lines of film, with the basic unit if rhythm logically being the frame. However, with the subsequent development of magnetic tape a few years later (and the advantages it has in convenience, speed, capacity to record, erase and playback live sound), the filmic development of electronic music initially envisioned by Cage was obscured. Had magnetic record tape never been invented, undoubtedly a rich new music would have developed via optical sound means, and composers would have found ways to work with film.

LINEAR DREAMS
Richard Reeves, Canada, 1997, colour, sound, 7 min
In Linear Dreams, Richard Reeves explores new realms of the imagination. The piece begins with a line pulsing to a heartbeat -the base for all living things. Images then explode and implode until they are released from the human form, expand outward over a vast mountain range, and then return to their origin. Reeves’ hand-drawn soundtrack underscores Linear Dreams, creating a multiple award-winning piece filled with rhythmic electricity.

BLACK AND LIGHT
Pierre Rovere, Black and Light, France, 1974, b/w, sound, 8 min
This film was directly executed on computer without cinematographic intervention or equipment. It is not the communication of a movement, but a succession of facts made up that the device of projection translated for us into impressions of movements. This film does not refer to an external reality, but wants to be its own reality.

DRESDEN DYNAMO
Lis Rhodes, UK, 1974, colour, sound, 5 min
The result of experiments with the application of Letraset and Letratone onto clear film. It is essentially about how graphic images create their own sound by extending into that area of film which is ‘read’ by optical sound equipment. The final print has been achieved through three separate, consecutive printings from the original material, on a contact printer. Colour was added with filters on the final run. The film is not a sequential piece. It does not develop crescendos. It creates the illusion of spatial depth from essentially flat, graphic, raw material. (Tim Bruce)

EXIT RIGHT
Chris Garrett, Exit Right, UK, 1976, b/w, sound, 3 min
A one second shot of me walking into the shot wearing a striped jersey was printed repeatedly. This strip of negative was moved laterally across the printer every ten seconds of film time, so that the image of the piece of film material, containing its figurative image moves into the projected frame from the left, across the frame and out across the optical soundtrack area to the right. Featuring a new line in Musical Pullovers.

MY MOVIE MELODIES
Jun’ichi Okuyama, Japan, 1980, b/w, sound, 7 min
In this film, the image produces the sound, and the sound is the image. It catches sight of landscapes and incidents. The various images are used to cover an extensive range of sounds. The principal melody is a radiograph of a comb.

MUSICAL STAIRS
Guy Sherwin, UK, 1977, b/w, sound, 10 min
I shot the images of a staircase specifically for the range of sounds they would produce. I used a fixed lens to film from a fixed position at the bottom of the stairs. Tilting the camera up increases the number of steps that are included in the frame. The more steps that are included in the frame the higher the pitch of sound. A simple procedure gave rise to a musical scale (in eleven steps) which is based on the laws of visual perspective. A range of volume is introduced by varying the exposure. The darker the image the louder the sound (it can be the other way round but Musical Stairs uses a soundtrack made from the negative of the picture). The fact that the staircase is neither a synthetic image, nor a particularly clean one (there happened to be leaves on the stairs when I shot the film) means that the sound is not pure, but dense with strange harmonies.

L’ARRIVÉE
Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 1998, b/w, sound, 3 min
Just as the record player needle has to find the right groove, “L’Arrive” has to settle into the perforation tracks before the narrative line can develop. A train arrives in a station where a hand-instigated collision with another train takes place. The event is not just a depiction, but a battle of the material itself. This is not the end, but the transition to a kiss, the Happy End. L’Arrive demonstrates where cinema begins – with the spectacular, and where it ends – with intimacy. (Bert Rebhandl)

SHUTTER
Taka Iimura, 1971, Japan, b/w, sound, 22 min
Using two projector speeds and various camera speeds, Iimura photographed the light thrown onto a screen by a projector with no film running through it. Because of the disparities between the speeds of the camera and projector shutters, the resulting footage, which he printed first in positive, then in negative, creates a series of flicker effects. One of the more interesting of those many works which have attempted to explore the visual potential of film process and materials. (Scott MacDonald)

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OHM TAPING: TAPE COMPOSITIONS & MUSIQUE CONCRETE
Thursday 18 October 2001, at 7:30pm
London Barbican Cinema

THRESHOLD
Malcolm Le Grice, UK, 1972, colour, sound, 10 min
Le Grice no longer simply uses the optical printer as a reflexive mechanism, but utilises the possibilities of colour-shift and permutation of imagery as the film progresses from simplicity to complexity. The initial use of pure red and green filters gives way to a broad variety of colours and the introduction of strips of coloured celluloid which are drawn through the printer and begins to build an image which becomes graphically and spatially complex – if still abstract – and which evokes the paintings of, say, Clifford Still or Morris Louis. With the film’s culmination in representational, photographic imagery, one would anticipate a culminating ‘richness’ of image; yet the insistent evidence of splice bars and the loop and repetition of the short piece of found footage and the conflicting superimposition of filtered loops all reiterate the work which is necessary to decipher that cinematic image. (Deke Dusinberre)

THE MALTESE CROSS MOVEMENT
Keewatin Dewdney, Canada, 1967, colour, sound, 8 min [The Beach Boys]
The film reflects Dewdney’s conviction that, “the projector, not the camera, is the filmmaker’s true medium”. The form and content of the film are shown to derive directly from the mechanical operation of the projector – specifically the animation of the disk and the cross illustrates graphically (no pun intended) the projector’s essential parts and movements. It also alludes to a dialectic of continuous-discontinuous movements that pervades the apparatus, from its central mechanical operation to the spectator’s perception of the film’s images … His soundtrack demonstrates that what we hear is also built out of continuous-discontinuous ‘sub-sets’. The film is organised around the principle that it can only complete itself when enough separate and discontinuous sounds have been stored up to provide the male voice on the soundtrack with the sounds needed to repeat a little girl’s poem; “The cross revolves at sunset / The moon returns at dawn / If you die tonight / Tomorrow you’re gone.” (William C. Wees)

VIET FLAKES
Carolee Schneemann, USA, 1965, b/w, sound, 9 min [James Tenney]
Composed from an obsessive collection of Vietnam atrocity images I collected from foreign magazines and newspapers over a five-year period. Magnifying glasses from the ‘five and dime’ were taped onto a borrowed 16mm Bolex in order to physically ‘travel’ within the photographs – producing a rough animation. Images in and out of focus, broken rhythms and pans, the abstracted shapes and motions, speeding perceptual contradictions. For instance, a pointillism of falling black specks in focus becomes bombs dropping through the sky; and impressionistic swirl of tones translates as faces of US soldiers leading barefoot villagers from a gas-filled tunnel; a “Rembrandt ink drawing” focuses in as a tank dragging a roped body… James Tenney’s sound collage intercuts three-second fragments of Vietnamese religious chants and secular songs with fragments of Bach and 1960s ‘Top of the Charts’.

XFILM
John Schofill, USA, 1966-68, colour, sound, 14 min [William Moraldo]
Through precise manipulation of individual frames and groups of frames, Schofill creates an overwhelming sense of momentum practically unequalled in synaesthetic cinema. There is almost a visceral, tactile impact to these images, which plunge across the field of vision like a dynamo. (Gene Youngblood)

I … DREAMING
Stan Brakhage, USA, 1988, colour, sound, 7 min [Joel Haertling]
A setting-to-film of a ‘collage’ of Stephen Foster phrases by composer Joel Haertling. The recurring musical themes and melancholia of Foster refer to ‘loss of love’ in the popular ‘torch song’ mode; but the film envisions a re-awakening of such senses-of-love as children know, and it posits (along a line of words scratched over picture) the psychology of waiting.

BEATLES ELECTRONIQUES
Jud Yalkut & Nam Jun Paik, USA, 1966-69, colour, sound, 3 min [Kenneth Werner]
Shot in black and white from a live broadcast of the Beatles while Paik electromagnetically improvised distortions on the receiver, and also from videotapes material produced during a series of experiments with filming off the monitor of a Sony videotape recorder. The film is three minutes long and is accompanied by an electronic soundtrack by composer Ken Werner, called “Four Loops”, derived from four electronically altered loops of Beatles sound material. The result is an eerie portrait of the Beatles not as pop stars, but rather as entities that exist solely in the world of electronic media. (Gene Youngblood)

ICE
JJ Murphy, USA, 1972, colour, sound, 7 min
To make Ice Murphy projected Franklin Miller’s film Whose Circumference is Nowhere onto one side of a block of ice and recorded what one could see through the ice from the opposite side, in a single continuous take. The soundtrack is a tape recorder recording under water. The result is a transformation of Miller’s film into an abstract experience of a very different kind. (Scott MacDonald)

MASAJE
Ivan Zulueta, Spain, 1972, b/w, sound, 3 min
Using the technique of direct photography off the TV screen, he composes three minutes “in which we see, speeded up, the complete television programming on a day of union and military parades. There was a subliminal Franco, and we didn’t even submit it to the censors…” The soundtrack alternates effects, noises and sounds of all kinds. The result is a really frenetic visual ‘massage’ that exposes the viewer’s eye to fleeting movie images, ads and news reports in rapid-fire succession. (Carlos F. Heredero)

MARVO MOVIE
Jeff Keen, 1967, UK, colour, sound, 5 min [Bob Cobbing]
Movie wizard initiates shatter brain experiment Eeeow! – the fastest movie firm alive – at 24 or 16fps even the mind trembles – splice up sequence two – flix unlimited, an inside yr very head the images explode – last years models new houses and such terrific death scenes while the time and space operator attacks the brain via the optic nerve – will the operation succeed – will the white saint reach in time the staircase now alive with blood – only time will tell says the movie master – meanwhile deep inside the space museum… (Ray Durgnat)

FIST FIGHT
Robert Breer, Fist Fight, USA, 1964, colour, sound 9 min [Karlheinz Stockhausen]
The film articulates separated by sections of blackness. In each burst a technique or series of images may dominate or provide a matrix, but all the elements (photographs, cartoons, abstractions) occur in each cluster. The serial structure is reinforced by the soundtrack. The filmmaker had completed the silent editing for a premiere presentation as part of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s event “Originale”, in New York in 1964. The soundtrack was initially recorded during the performances of the event, including the film’s projection. Breer then composed bursts of audience noise, music, and nearly quiet backgrounds in relationship to the images. (P. Adams Sitney)

KAKSI KANAA
Eino Ruutsalo, Finland 1963, colour, sound, 4 min [Erkki Kurenniemi]
According to Ruutsalo himself, Kaksi kanaa (1963) was composed spontaneously out of throwaway footage. It features a hysterical cavalcade of female nudity, oppressed screen tests, crackers, a floating feather plus an overdose of paint and colour. The soundtrack is a refined electro-acoustical tape collage made by composer Otto Donner. This score, mostly played on Erkki Kurenniemi’s home-built electronic instruments, is a forgotten peak moment of Finnish film music. Kaksi Kanaa is cinematic action painting, and in its condensed expression perhaps Ruutsalo’s most original and permanent masterpiece. (Mika Taanila)

TURN TURN TURN
Jud Yalkut, USA, 1965-66, colour, sound, 10 min [The Byrds]
A film of the eye-shattering, flashing, rotating light sculptures programmed by USCO to turn turn turn the popular song into a rich electronic fugue on the word NOW: Let’s take the OW out of NOW, let’s take the NO out of NOW. (Film Quarterly)

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