Seeing Sound

In the history of sound in experimental film, one of the most important creative practices is the use of sound tracks created by images. Most film-sound systems use what is known as an optical sound track, a variable-area film exposure…

Formal experimentation with sound and image relations is one key way that avant-garde filmmakers have challenged the ‘classical’ cinema. Some well-known film artists (famously Stan Brakhage) choose to eschew the ‘grand opera’ of sound altogether. Others have worked to problematise…

Sound/image relations reconfigured, fractured and re-set at strange angles. Recombinations that divide audiovisual planes. De-conventionalising of social and cinematic space. Independent, outsider, autodidactic methodologies. Scored, scoured, scraped, scratched back, re-inscribed (cinema as a palimpsest), re-laid, mis-tessellated and overlapped (cinema as…

A program exploring the limits of black & white film’s unique facility to communicate relationships between sound, image and space. Abstract film pioneer Viking Eggeling’s silent ‘pure film’ experiment, Diagonal Symphony (1921), explores the capacity of moving image to evoke the qualities…

“abstronics” is what lewis carrol would have called a portmanteou word. it is composed of the first one and a half syllables of “abstractions” and the last one and a half syllables of “electronics”. the letter “r”, fortuitously, is the…

Visual music pioneer Mary Ellen Bute’s final film was also her first feature  film. James Joyce’s classic story of Irish tavern-keeper who dreams of attending  his own wake is brought to the screen with a sparkling energy which highlights  its…