Old and New (1929) from Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov
Romance Sentimentale by Sergei Eisenstein (1930)
In 1982, Soviet directors Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov signed a statement on sound cinema, fearing that “cheap realism” such as synchronization of sound and picture would eat into the charm of the cinema, tantamount to canned theater, and derail the development of montage. “Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov practiced this approach in their films Old and New and Romance Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov in their films Old and New and Romance practiced these two types of desynchronization in their films Sentimentale, making the picture and the sound completely independent.
This sound is effective, and picture and sound present a complex relationship between sound and picture.
Norman McLaren – Dots (1940)
Norman McLaren: Rythmetic
Blinkity Blank Norman McLaren – 1955
This experimental short film by Norman McLaren is a playful exercise in intermittent animation and spasmodic imagery. Playing with the laws relating to persistence of vision and after-image on the retina of the eye, McLaren engraves pictures on blank film creating vivid, percussive effects.
Norman McLaren used a combination of hand-drawn and musical drawn soundtracks in his abstract films a way between audio-visual synchronization and non-synchronization that made animation a lot more interesting
Walter Ruttman – Weekend（1929）
Walter Ruttman created Weekend, a “sound film without images,” a rapid montage of dialog, noise, and music. He felt it was a “process of filming those auditory phenomena in a manner that breaks down formal constraints while specifically bringing in the specific spatial characteristics of each of those auditory phenomena.”
Rameau’s Nephew (1974) by Michael Snow
The sound and images are imaginatively arranged and combined in a variety of ways and sequences throughout the film’s 26 separate segments, and Snow elaborates, “This development stems not only from reacting to our daily lives, but also from the association of the recordings themselves with portrait light and shadow. Because of this, the movie becomes the events of our lives themselves, rather than a report on them.”
Bill Viola – The Deluge
Bill Viola specializes in using video technology to create intense visual and emotional experiences. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness.
Worry Will Vanish – Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist is a visual artist from Switzerland, whose work is full of pairs of vibrant colors, and in this piece she uses ultra-clear close-ups of detailed human skin in a kaleidoscopic presentation that reveals an eerie sense of intimacy and beauty.
“The Clock” was made over a period of three years and consists of about 12,000 moments from different movies that make up 24 hours. In the movie we can see the time displayed through sundials, hourglasses, floor clocks, pocket watches, flashing microwave LEDs, and the time displayed on the screen will be the same as that displayed on a watch or smartphone. The time displayed on the screen will be the same as the time displayed on a watch or smartphone. When watching a movie, you are watching time. The concept is somewhat similar to a collage. When editing audio, Marclay had to think about how the audio would transition smoothly to the next clip, and they sounded like they were actually composing a new musical score.
The Clock is very much about death in a way. It is a memento mori. The narrative gets interrupted constantly and you’re constantly reminded of what time it is. So you know exactly how much time you spent in front of The Clock.
-Christian Marclay
Malcolm Le Grice – Threshold (1972)
Le Grice no longer simply uses the 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 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.
Cao Fei (曹斐) – Whose Utopia, 2006
Cao Fei made this video during her residency at a lighting factory in Foshan, Guangdong Province. She invites the workers to put aside their daily work for a while and reveal their latent desires next to the production line of the factory, thus raising the question of whether utopia exists in the era of economic reform and globalization.
“It’s interesting because it’s a light bulb factory; it illuminates our material world, but at the same time, does it illuminate their inner selves, or does it light up their lives?” — Cao Fei
Research from:
Licht, A. (2019) Sound art revisited. London: Oxford$pNew Dehli.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/lists/five-ways-christian-marclays-clock-does-more-just-tell-time
https://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/malcolm_le_grice/threshold.html