A. Birtwistle

Douglas Gordon and Cinematic Audiovisuality in the Age of Television: Experiencing the Experience of Cinema

Focusing on the work of Douglas Gordon, this article explores some of the ways in which contemporary arts practice engages with cinema in a televisual age. Whenever one media technology loses its dominance, is eclipsed or replaced by another, we witness a moment during which the passing technology becomes fetishized – a moment at which the status of its images and sounds and even their perceived qualities begin to change. Within the context of contemporary arts practice, the images of a once popular form of cinema have thus begun to take on the aura of the art object, read and experienced in new ways. Understandably, much of the critical reaction to Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parrenos Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait has focused on its status as a film about football, and as a portrait of one of the sports stars. The film might, however, also be read as a meditation on cinematic affect and cinematic materiality, and in this respect sits comfortably with Gordons ongoing creative engagement with cinema, evidenced in works such as 24 Hour Psycho. While much of Gordons video work has engaged with the cinematic image through the re-articulation of Hollywood films, in this article I examine the ways in which Zidane creates a dialectic between cinema and television that serves to foreground cinematic materiality and cinematic experience. Reconnecting Zidane with Gordons earlier work, my aim here is to consider how cinematic experience and the materiality that serves as the foundation of that experience might in themselves be understood to constitute a fundamental element of Gordons artworks.

Heavy Weather: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tsai Ming-liang, and The Poetics of Environmental Sound

While recent scholarship has done much to address the long-standing visual bias of film studies, there is perhaps one aspect of the film soundtrack that has remained relatively neglected by critical enquiry: namely, the use of sound effects, and in particular ambient or “atmos” sound. My aim in this article is to explore the cinesonic deployment of envi- ronmental sound through a comparative study of the work of Michelangelo Antonioni and Tsai Ming-liang—two directors who, I will argue, make significant use of this particular resource in articulating a shared concern with the conditions of modernity. In considering the ways in which environmental sound plays through the films of these particular direc- tors, my concern is not only to situate this aspect of the soundtrack in relation to matters of authorship, but also to frame the cinesonic use of environmental sound within a discussion of the poetics of noise. Thus I argue that, when auditioned within the context offered by politico-aesthetic formulations of noise, the environmental sounds of Antonioni and Tsai’s films communicate significant differences in the world-views of two directors whose work is often thought to share many similarities.

Marking time and sounding difference: Brubeck, temporality and modernity

In critical writing on the music of Dave Brubeck, little attention has been paid to the use of polyrhythm, despite the fact that this has been central to Brubecks approach to jazz since the late 1940s. Focusing on work recorded by the ‘classic’ Dave Brubeck Quartet, the article aims to re-evaluate Brubecks use of polyrhythm by situating it within a cultural history of modernity, rather than the established discourses of jazz musicology. The article revisits the early 1960s to reconstruct the context provided for the music not only by articles printed in the music press, but also by news stories and features run in the popular press, and by the visual signifiers that coalesce around Brubeck. Articulated through the key tropes of modernity and difference, the presss construction of Brubeck during this period signals the broad cultural context of Modernism as an alternative frame within which his musical practice might be usefully situated. The article explores how two key cultural artefacts emerging from this context – Brubecks Oakland home, and the Miro canvas featured on the cover of the album Time Further Out – might serve to provide a productive means by which to re-evaluate the radical potential of Brubecks polyrhythm.

Electroacoustic composition and the British documentary tradition

This chapter considers how the blurring of sound design and music, often seen as a feature of contemporary cinema, developed within earlier forms of cinematic expression. Focusing on British documentary cinema, Andy Birtwistle examines innovative uses of sound in documentary filmmaking, paying particular attention to forms of cinematic musique concrete that emerged following early experimentation with film sound technology in the 1930s. Considering key works by directors Basil Wright and Geoffrey Jones, and composers Walter Leigh, Daphne Oram and Tristram Cary, the chapter considers the ways in which filmmakers and composers working in documentary have manipulated and organized recorded sound, producing forms of electracoustic practice that prefigure and parallel the radical developments that took place in modern music after World War II.