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The Imagined Voice 2017 JULY

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The Imagined Voice 2017 JULY Cover Page The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/58691 holds various files of this Leiden University dissertation. Author: Kyriakides, Y. Title: Imagined Voices : a poetics of Music-Text-Film Issue Date: 2017-12-21 Chapter 4: Historical Perspective The use of projected text in cinema, art, music and various hybrid forms of literature makes an intriguing footnote to twentieth century art practice. This is often associated with an art that is, in the first place, non-absolute, narrative, and exhibits hybrid tendencies that encompass both experimental and commercial cultures. It transgresses the purity of Greenberg's medium-specific modernism that has dominated much artistic practice in the last century, and about which there has been fierce debate in cinema, music, theatre and literature. In cinema, where projected text first appeared in the form of 'intertitles', the debate raged in the mid 1910s and continued into the 1920s, as to whether text should have a place in film, or whether narration should be left solely to the power of the image. The development of sound film eventually put an end to this discussion, as hearing words took over the role of reading words. On the other hand, in twentieth century visual art, language has played a vital role, from inscriptions on paintings of the impressionists, Dada and conceptual art, to new media and hypertext, with each movement redefining its relation to the written word. In the following chapter I attempt to trace a history of text-films or text-films touching on some of the main art practices they are found in. The sections are organised in terms of metaphoric relations between the two dominant media. This I found useful in examining how various practices and conceptions of media can lead to such different outcomes, though I do not want to make it seem like this is an absolute form of categorisation. The beauty of most of this work, is that it does not easily fall into one particular established art practice, and as such pushes on the boundaries of a given medium. Because it is organised utilizing the point of view of the most dominant medium; the context that the art is made, as discussed in the previous chapter, plays an important defining role. In this way, where image is the dominant medium, the work tends to be created by artists operating in a visual or cinematic context. Where music is the dominant medium and where language or text are the source of the meaning by which the music is understood, one finds the most examples that fall into contemporary music practice, as sound is here prioritised over language and image. I begin with the section 'Image as Language', because it is this relation, which in my opinion defines the earliest and most iconic example of text-film, Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema. Within this category one could also discuss the practice of film titling and the many ingenious examples of how text is used to construct image. Because these latter examples tend not to be autonomous entities, but are overshadowed by the qualities of the film they are coupled to, I thought it unnecessary to single any out. 96 In the section of 'Music as Language', there are many fascinating examples to choose from, but I focus on Dick Raaijmakers' Ballade Erlkönig because of its juxtaposition of seemingly divergent elements. In 'Language as Music' I discuss two influential films created by the founders of the Lettrist avant-garde movement, Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître. The work of the Lettrists is far ranging, and has been highly influential on subsequent waves of art experimentalists, from the Situationists to American abstract films of the 60's. What is interesting in this context of their work, is the theory of cinéma discrépant, the divergence and independence of all the elements of cinema, and how initially the focus on the level of the letter and the removal of semantic elements of language led to sound poetry and their particular idiosyncratic music. The Lettrists could just as well be discussed in the section on 'Language as Image', but instead, here I bring up two films that are personal favourites of mine, created by artists associated with the so-called Structural film movement, Hollis Frampton, and Michael Snow. In both these works, but in different ways, the word or language as a structure is used to understand something about the temporal framework of the cinematic medium. The music video would be a natural subject to discuss in 'Music as Image', as image is used at the service of projecting or understanding something about the song it represents. Instead of taking one particular pop video as an example, I thought it would be interesting to analyse sections of film-maker Adam Curtis' It Felt Like a Kiss, because of the complex interaction between narrative, image, song and lyrics. Essentially here is a 'jukebox' film, a playlist of songs from the 60's, that are contextualised in a complex narrative, using stock footage from the BBC library, reminiscent in style to Guy Debord's film La Société du Spectacle. Unlike in most of Curtis' films, in It Felt Like a Kiss, there is no spoken narration, and songs and images are underscored with an on-screen text. Music here is very much in the foreground, as the narrative deals in part with the singers of the songs used. Finally in the section 'Image as Music', I discuss two films that could be said to belong to an abstract film culture, Stan Brakhage's I Dreaming and Guy Sherwin's Newsprint. In the former, a song is used as the basis of a melancholic visual contemplation on memory and consciousness; in the latter, the image of newsprint is sonified, so that one understands the structure of the image through the pattern of what one hears. 97 4.1 Image as Language The first paradigm concerns the use of words to construct an image. In this metaphoric relation between image and language, the attributes of language are used primarily in a visual representation. Sound or music is in this case relegated to a supporting or non-existent role. The visual medium takes dominance, and words are used primarily for their iconic status rather than the meaning they might convey. This is not to say that in the examples given, meaning is totally absent, rather there is a redundancy of meaning. A primary example of this is film title design. Here the text is informative but not essential in understanding the film. It might be useful to know who the principal creators of the film are, but it is often more of a vehicle for expressing the visual identity of the ensuing feature. The visual message conveyed has an impact on how the film as a whole is understood. Rather than analyse a specific case of film titling, I prefer to look at an example from the visual art avant- garde, that not only represents this approach to 'image as language', but is probably the father of all text-films, Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (1926). Signed under his alter ego name of Rrose Sélavy, Anemic Cinema (1926) is a 7 minute film which alternates sequences of spinning 'rotoreliefs' with sequences of erotic puns rendered in a similar spiralling form. The rotoreliefs were optical works that Duchamp had been developing since the early 1920's, initially with Man Ray.39 They were essentially painted concentric circles on cardboard disks, that when spun on a turntable, gave the illusion of three dimensional movement. By combining and juxtaposing this illusion of movement and space with text, he reduces the elements of silent film to the play of movement and language. 4.1.1 Intertitles To understand the context of words in film of the 1920's, it is useful to see it in the light of the use of intertitles. The alteration of rotoreliefs with spiralling texts exactly mimics the dual state of mainstream film of the time, that of image and word. Early cinema required narrative to make sense of images, since as a vehicle of mass- entertainment, the cinematic experience is essentially one of stories told in images. Before sound film, intertitles were used to convey both narrative context and any dialogue deemed necessary to the understanding of the storyline. In this sense, the intertitle was something of a transitional convention. Essentially, intertitles or 'title- cards' were printed texts edited into the film sequence, which would either carry dialogue, give some background narrative information related to the images, or just describe what was happening. 'Dialogue intertitles' would appear just after the 39 A catalogue of the work inspired by their friendship is published by the Sean Kelly Gallery: Marcel Duchamp/Man Ray: 50 Years of Alchemy, 2005. 98 actor's lips were seen moving, while the 'expository intertitles', which would set the context of the narrative, would appear at the beginning of scenes. They would differ in appearance in the emphasis of the lettering, in the framing of the title card, or with the use of quotations. It is interesting to note, that with the advent of dialogue in sound films, and the logical disappearance of dialogue intertitles, the falling away of expository intertitles was not so expected. This seems to imply that films relied more heavily on signposting the narrative than was in fact necessary (Chisholm 1987: 137). The general development of intertitle use can be seen as moving from externally driven narratives to internal driven ones of diegetic texts and character dialogues, the idea being, that a closer relation to the character's point of view, would lead to a more emotional experience of the narrative.
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