236 research outputs found
Acoustic ghosts and haunted landscapes in contemporary British landscape cinema
No full textIn “Invention, Memory, and Place,” Edward Said asserts that geography as a socially constructed concept can invest a geographical location with particular mythological significance and power through the creation of collective memory and narrative. Touching on theories gleaned from social geography, hauntology, acoustic ecology and trauma studies, this chapter draws on this idea in order to investigate the notion of fabricated cinematic narratives imposed on specific rural geographic locales through music and soundscape in British films such as Sunset Song (2005, Terence Davies) and Wuthering Heights (2011, Andrea Arnold). Rather than using landscape as a physical background for action, these films use representations of landscapes haunted by hyperreal soundscapes and musical ghosts in order to allow for a psychological engagement with these constructed environments
Acoustic ghosts and haunted landscapes in contemporary British landscape cinema
No full textIn “Invention, Memory, and Place,” Edward Said asserts that geography as a socially constructed concept can invest a geographical location with particular mythological significance and power through the creation of collective memory and narrative. Touching on theories gleaned from social geography, hauntology, acoustic ecology and trauma studies, this chapter draws on this idea in order to investigate the notion of fabricated cinematic narratives imposed on specific rural geographic locales through music and soundscape in British films such as Sunset Song (2005, Terence Davies) and Wuthering Heights (2011, Andrea Arnold). Rather than using landscape as a physical background for action, these films use representations of landscapes haunted by hyperreal soundscapes and musical ghosts in order to allow for a psychological engagement with these constructed environments
Introduction
No full textIn recent years, there has not only been an emerging interest in soundtracks in audiovisual culture but also an interest in the less solid spectral aspects of culture more generally. The turn of the Millennium has heralded a significant outgrowth of culture that demonstrates an awareness of the ephemeral nature of history and the complexity underpinning the relationship between location and the past. This has been especially apparent in the contemplation of the shifting relationship between landscape, memory and sound in film, television and beyond. This collection of essays focuses in particular on audiovisual forms that foreground landscape, sound and memory. The scope of inquiry for this collection of essays emphasises the ineffable ghostly qualities of a certain body of soundtracks, extending beyond merely the idea of “scary films: or “haunted houses”. Rather, the notion of sonic haunting is tied to ideas of trauma, anxiety or nostalgia associated with spatial and temporal dislocation in contemporary society. Touchstones for our approach are the concepts of psychogeography and hauntology, pervasive and established critical strategies that are interrogated and refined in relation to the reification of the spectral within the soundtracks under consideration here.<br/
Introduction
No full textIn recent years, there has not only been an emerging interest in soundtracks in audiovisual culture but also an interest in the less solid spectral aspects of culture more generally. The turn of the Millennium has heralded a significant outgrowth of culture that demonstrates an awareness of the ephemeral nature of history and the complexity underpinning the relationship between location and the past. This has been especially apparent in the contemplation of the shifting relationship between landscape, memory and sound in film, television and beyond. This collection of essays focuses in particular on audiovisual forms that foreground landscape, sound and memory. The scope of inquiry for this collection of essays emphasises the ineffable ghostly qualities of a certain body of soundtracks, extending beyond merely the idea of “scary films: or “haunted houses”. Rather, the notion of sonic haunting is tied to ideas of trauma, anxiety or nostalgia associated with spatial and temporal dislocation in contemporary society. Touchstones for our approach are the concepts of psychogeography and hauntology, pervasive and established critical strategies that are interrogated and refined in relation to the reification of the spectral within the soundtracks under consideration here.<br/
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, 43rd Annual ODU Literary Festival
No full textAimee Nezhukumatathil is a 2020 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and the author of four books of poetry: Oceanic; Lucky Fish (winner of the Hoffer Grand Prize for Prose and Independent Books); At the Drive-In Volcano; and Miracle Fruit. She is co-author of Lace & Pyrite, a chapbook of nature poems (2014). She is the poetry editor of Orion magazine and her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and Tin House. Awards for her writing include an NEA Fellowship in poetry and the Pushcart Prize. She is professor of English and creative writing in the MFA program of the University of Mississippi
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, 27th Annual ODU Literary Festival
No full textAimee Nezhukumatathil was born in Chicago in 1974. She received her BA in English and her MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction from Ohio State University. She is the author of Fishbone, and was the Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin. She is currently an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York in Fredonia. Her most recent book, Miracle Fruit, won the 2002 Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize in Poetry
2016-2017 Aimee Nezhukumatathil
No full textAimee Nezhukumatathil is professor of English in the University of Mississippi\u27s MFA program. Her newest collection of poems is OCEANIC (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), published after her year as the Grisham Writer in Residence. She is also the author of the forthcoming book of illustrated nature essays, WORLD OF WONDER (2019, Milkweed), and three previous poetry collections: LUCKY FISH (2011), AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO (2007), and MIRACLE FRUIT (2003)–all from Tupelo Press. Her most recent chapbook is LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of nature poems with the poet Ross Gay. She is the poetry editor of Orion magazine and her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry 2015 & 2018 series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and Tin House. Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pushcart Prize. (Photo credit: Ted Ely)https://egrove.olemiss.edu/grisham_res/1003/thumbnail.jp
‘Feel Everything’: Animation, Advertising and Affect in Cinema and Television Idents
No full textDuring periods of economic threat or existential crisis cinema has turned to spectacle to highlight its unique qualities as a form of entertainment. Part of cinema’s allure is the promise of an experience that you cannot enjoy at home and recent animated idents highlight the spectacular affective qualities of Sony 4K and Dolby Digital technology particular to the multiplex. This is not only limited to the cinema theatre with related promotional strategies predicated on notions of intersensory correspondence and technological developments increasingly drawn on by the television industry in an era of increased competition for viewers. In 2006 VFX studio The Mill produced a series of short animated trailers as part of the Sky HD launch campaign under the tagline ‘Feel Everything’, which were screened in both cinemas and on television. This tagline highlights an intention to touch the audience on a corporeal level, to offer them a whole-body experience that actively engages their sensorium. Innovations in sound and image technology such as Dolby Digital and 4K image resolution, both in the cinema and the home, have affected the way audiences comprehend the hierarchy between music/sound and image, allowing for an ambiguity between what audiovisual information they perceive and how they perceive it. The Mill suggests that the animation for the Sky campaign ‘was looking so fantastic with details you felt you could reach out and touch’. Yet they also remind us that this potential to feel the image through the eyes and ears of the audience was nonetheless an advertisement for the spectacle of what this new technology could provide. This chapter contends that these idents are employing hyperreal audiovisual aesthetics premised on the ability of technological advances and intersensory correspondence to physically touch audiences in order to advertise the unique affectivequalities of cinema and increasingly television
A Consideration of the Absolute in Visual Music Animation
No full textThe idea of the absolute film first emerged in the early part of the twentieth century, reinforcing the philosophical or aesthetic connection between a certain body of non-objective moving image productions and non-programmatic music. Drawing on the notion of absolute music as a music free from extra-musical consideration, the absolute film might sensibly be defined as a moving image presentation that is abstract and non-figurative in nature without overt programme or narrative. This book chapter extends the musical analogy further to draw on two distinct but overlapping musicological claims to the absolute, the formal absolutism of musicologist Eduard Hanslick and the spiritual absolutism of philosophers such as F.W.J Schelling. Reducing the idea of the absolute to two overarching categories, the formal absolute and the spiritual absolute, not only allows for an overview of the changing trends and aesthetics of the absolute film but also provides a methodology for interrogating the moving image work of figures such as Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Jordan Belson, James Whitney and John Whitney, in the process illustrating how musical ideas can be applied conceptually to the moving image in order to elucidate both the musical and metaphysical characteristics of the text
Audio-visual moiré patterns: Phasing in Guy Sherwin’s Optical Sound films
Full text linkBritish experimental film-maker Guy Sherwin’s optical sound films from the 1970s explore the corporeal correspondence between sound and image through a transposition of the optical soundtrack into the visual images presented on-screen. These films are fundamentally a series of experiments investigating not only the relationship between sound and image, but also the essence and materiality of film itself. Sherwin asserts that his optical sound films have three discernible influences on them: the rigorous structuralism of the London Film-Maker’s Co-op of the 1970s, the idea of aural-visual equivalence, and Steve Reich’s contemporaneous musical experiments with sound phasing. Bearing this assertion in mind, this article intends to explore how Sherwin’s films, such as Phase loop (1971/2007), subvert conventional notions of sound and synchronization in film from the vantage point of structural-materialist film theory. Further to this, it will also consider the influence of Reich’s use of phasing, looping, and his stress on the importance of process in the structuring of material, in order to assess the effects of perceptual shifts as extended to the audio-visual experience by Sherwin
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