Sound Versus System
Cinema programme 19th-31st October 2013
Wed-Fri 11am-5pm; Sat-Sun 12-5pm
Curated by Mike Sperlinger
The programme runs twice daily from 11am Wed-Fri and from 12pm Sat-Sun. On weekends, Manon de Boer’s film Think About Wood, Think About Metal will only be shown once at around 2pm.
April 16, 1989, David Byrne & David Wild, 1989, 3min
Participation, Steina & Woody Vasulka, 1969–71, 63min
–– ––––– Thom Andersen & Malcolm Brodwick, 1966–67, 11min
Lost Sound, John Smith with Graeme Miller, 1998–2001, 28min
The Eye And The Ear, Franciszka & Stefan Themerson, 1945, 10min
Think About Wood, Think About Metal, Manon de Boer, 201, 48min
Part 1: The (re)discovery of sync
When the Portapak video camera became available in the late 1960s, it finally allowed the easy simultaneous recording of sound and image using a single handheld device. The response of Steina and Woody Vasulka was to go out and record as many of the concerts and performances around them in New York, from Don Cherry to Warhol’s Superstars. David Byrne and David Wild’s short film, some twenty years later, takes the idea of sync sound to its exaggerated extremes.
David Byrne & David Wild
April 16, 1989
USA, 1989, 35mm, 3 mins
“I just remember David had shot a bunch of interviews that I think we’re part of the interstitial elements of Storytelling Giant and then he sent me the dailies and wondered if we could make a short film with footage. We ended up using the parts where the interviewees were staring at the camera either listening to the question or thinking about an answer. If I remember correctly, there’s only one line of dialogue at the end — so it’s kind of a cool experience to see all these people on screen looking out at the audience for four minutes. I imagine it looks great on the big screen. A self-reflexive experience. Funny, I never asked David where he came up with the title — he comes up with great titles, but we made the film in 1988 so when April 16th rolled around the next year…”
– David Wild
“April 16 1989 was all David Wild’s idea.
I had previously shot a group of non-actors telling short personal stories—each of them in front of an obviously fake rear projection of a location—for use as interstitial pieces for a collection of music videos.
Once the stories were chosen and harvested, we looked at the tantalizing leftovers and wondered if some other kind of piece could be made with that material. I gave Wild complete free reign and he came back with a short piece full of existential dread and humor. …it’s a world of awkward moments and pregnant pauses…the world we live in….and one whispered desperate statement. I laughed, and I loved it.”
– David Byrne
Steina Vasulka, Woody Vasulka
Participation
USA, 1969–1971, 63 minutes
B&W, Sound, Video
Participation represents the Vasulka’s experience of the New York downtown art scene in the late ’60s and early ’70s. A fascinating portrait of wildly creative people, places and times, it uses the recently introduced Portapak video system to document, among other gems, Don Cherry trumpeting in Washington Square, Warhol Superstars on stage, and Jimi Hendrix in concert. Participation is a pioneering video documentary, and a free-form time capsule of an era.
Part 2: Found sound and wild systems
Two films in which ‘found’ scraps of music feed into the filmmaker’s self-generated system, in each case leading to a parody of both conventional soundtracks and structuralist high-seriousness.
Thom Andersen & Malcolm Brodwick
–– ––––– (Short Line, Long Line)
USA, 1966–1967, 11 minutes
Colour, Sound (Optical), 16mm, HD Video
Projection instructions: play as loudly as possible. A documentary about rock ‘n’ roll. The Canned Heat, City Lights, Seeds of Time, LA Tymes, Llyn Foulkes, Charlie Watts, Chris & Craig, Duke of Earl, Seeburg, Wurlitzer, The Trip, The Lynch Bldg., Top’s, Pandora’s Box, Maverick’s Flat, someone’s backyard. Riot in cell block number nine, riot on Sunset Strip. Hotrod, coin slot, go cart, bomp club. Hound Dog Man, King Creole. Kim Weston, The Shangri-Las, The Supremes, Earl-Jean. The Rainbows, Wolfman Jack, Ernie Bushmiller, Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles, The Who, The Coasters. Standing at the crossroads of love. Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, John Cale, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Howlin Wolf, James Brown – The King. Wax reclamation. Frankie Avalon, The Beatles, The Yardbirds, Great Balls of Fire, an early clue to a new direction. Standing, walking, jumping, singing, surfing. Radio, jukebox, scopitone, pinball, poolhall. Mick Jagger/Earth Angel. Documentary material organised by a predetermined structure. A sequence of picture-sound equations with randomly chosen terms: vertically, the film is completely structured, horizontally, it is completely random. A pastiche of cinematography, a parody of montage.
John Smith
Lost Sound (collaboration with Graeme Miller 1998–2001)
28 mins, Colour. Sound. Video
Lost Sound documents fragments of discarded audio tape found on the streets of a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each piece of tape with images of the place where it was found. The work explores the potential of chance, creating portraits of particular places by building formal, narrative and musical connections between images and sounds linked by the random discovery of the tape samples.
Part 3: Parallel tracks
Film has always had to choose whether to attempt to assimilate itself to musical structures, as in the ‘visual music’ experiments of the 1930s and ’40s, or to maintain its own logic of editing and construction in the face of structures like musical improvisation.
Franciszka & Stefan Themerson
The Eye And The Ear
UK, 1944–1945, 10 minutes
B&W, Sound (Optical), 16mm, 35mm, Video
Four types of visual interpretation of four songs by Karol Szymanowski, Polish words by Julian Tuwin.
Manon de Boer
Think about Wood, Think about Metal
16mm transferred to video, color, 4:3, dolby suround, English spoken, BE, 2011, 48′
Think about Wood, Think about Metal is de Boer’s third cinematic portrait in a trilogy on the 1970s alongside Sylvia Kristel – Paris (2003) and Resonating Surfaces (2005). Fragments of the life and thinking of percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky are situated in the history of avant-garde music during and after the 1970s. Schulkowsky has worked with composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Derek Bailey, John Zorn, Frederic Rzewski and Christian Wolff. In the film, percussion improvisations by Schulkowsky form a soundtrack, one that resonates with a larger exploration of rhythm and the non-linear structuring of time. Here many of the themes central to de Boer’s practice, including questions of the nature, impact and nuances of memory are explored, as well as aspects of stillness and movement, and the relationship between the two.