Lecture 10 – what counts as an unusual approach? – ARCH11011

1. What counts as an unusual approach?

1 What counts as an unusual approach?

This session concerns itself with the ways that you might tackle the challenge of responding to a fixed media opportunity and bringing your own voice to the fore of your sound work. We’ll explore approach-types and you can consider in light these somewhat arbitrary categories how your approach fits in.

1.1 The standard approach… “you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all”

What is standard? This worthwhile discussion to have with yourself. It helps us to quickly identify a particular sense of what’s required in order to respond to a challenge.

There has been much research on both standards of film practices, but also on generic approaches to film construction. This research draws our attention to what we may have suspected all along, that there are standardised approaches to editing and cutting films together. There are also perhaps some ways that are more effective than others.

However, it’s useful to question “better at what…?

The material of film itself becomes a form of information and training, both to audiences and film makers. There is a ‘type’ of film that may well articulate itself in very similar ways in terms of pacing, timing and other styles of its execution. Hollywood films are one format that seems to exploit this training, as do youTube help videos such as unboxing and game screen grabs.

people.psych.cornell.edu/~jec7/pictures_film.htm

The papers cited below by James Cutting explains how “

filmmakers have systematically explored dimensions that are important for holding our attention

Cutting, James E., Jordan E. DeLong, and Kaitlin L. Brunick. 2018. ‘Temporal Fractals in Movies and Mind’. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 3 (1): 8. doi.org/10.1186/s41235-018-0091-x.

Summarised here: www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527483-900-solved-the-mathematics-of-the-hollywood-blockbuster/

1.1.1 Watch this analysis and review of Phantom Menace

1.2 The oblique approach

Where meaning is obscured through the materials of the film itself. Consider watching Memento Nolan (2000). It’s available to view on the BoB national archive: learningonscreen.ac.uk/. This film unpicks itself from the inside out so the editing and other factors are part of the obscuring of what’s being said.

In a different way, Elephant Gus Van Sant (2003), layers streams of sound on top of one another in order to make simple visual structures pass time in a provocative way. Why this happens remains oblique throughout. The reason we hear Westerkamp’s music non-dietetically with the hint that it might somehow be diegetic, suggests unease, but is never resolved and remains enigmatic. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c-plmGkeUc

mpv Elephant/Elephant-GusVanSant.mkv –start=+07:45 –length=+04:35 –fs

Fanboy stuff on Gus Van Sant here; magnoliaforever.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/gus-van-sants-death-trilogy/

1.3 A systems approach

A systems approach might be one where the systems behind the material are clearly part of the message that’s being communicated. The embracing of technology as material is nothing new to us and cinema itself could be thought of as an expression of the technologies that it uses, perhaps more-so than the material that it renders which is clearly a fiction. What we can’t escape is the technological fact of the machine that’s doing the representations.

Check out Ryioichi Kurokowa: www.ryoichikurokawa.com/project/ualt.html

Or for a more historic pioneer in this area, check out Norman McLaren’s work:

1.4 An intuitive approach

Stan Brakhage Moth Light (1963) www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaGh0D2NXCA

Peter Kubelka Schwechater (1958) www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy78LNZFMIE

Or this one; Peter Kubelka Arnulf Rainer (1960) www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-_WhYf-Wg “following the explicit instructions of the filmmaker to play the sound at maximum level and to let the film and leader play until it ran out, them leave the projector running fir a minute with its lamp still on then to turn it off and sit in the dark for a minute. “

These intuitive-seeming films above also are systems-based in their approach. This is in part thanks to their abstraction, but we can also hone in on the intuitive, improvisational and happenstance as also being foregrounded here. Care for linear details are eschewed in favour of a spontaneous-seeming sprawl, a phenomona, an experience.

1.5 An experimental approach

Hukkle (2002) www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad5WwmLH_1w

I describe Hukkle as experimental as it seems like an extremely rigorous investigation of a singular idea. It’s a test of immersion, powers of concentration, the role of sound in film and is a particularly carefully explored statement on Hungarian national identity. This is well explained in the following essay: www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc55.2013/kalmarHukkle/index.html

mpv hukkle.mkv –start=+00:45 –length=+05:35 –fs

1.6 The Wagnerian Approach

Wolf of Wall Street | The Revenant | StarWars | Tarantino | Kubrick etc…?

The links with opera and film are clear. Film seems to be the logical inheritor of the Geampkunstwerke concept espoused by Wager. It’s a form of total control and total expressivity and conceptual freedom.

1.7 A formats approach

Obsessed with Cinemagraphs

It’s interesting sometimes to take a format-led approach where you optimise materials for the format you’re going to place them in.

1.8 The obvious approach

The conceptual/symbolic approach where one thing directly points to the other. It’s called Mickey Mousing, My little pony anyone…? www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_EDBM1tOEo Fantasia Walt Disney, (1940)

1.9 Is a sum of approaches, your approach?

It is for you to work out what your approach is going to be. What will you foreground as your expressive strategy?

1.10 with this in mind, how will you find your film or piece of fixed media to work on?

How will your project allow you to speak? How will you make your project sound?

Lecture 10 – what counts as an unusual approach?

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