The Audio-Visual Dance

Experimental Tuesdays at the University of Milwaukee’s Union Theatre just displayed four films and two videos under the program title, “Break in the chain of light.” All of them were interesting in their own way. Each of these separate movies had their visual interact differently with its audio. I always view the audio-visual relationship as a sort of dance between the two sensory modes. Sometimes visual and audio and synced together, for example, when a glass comes into contact with another glass you hear an expected “ting” to ring out in the audio as a reaction to the visual. Other times a soundtrack will be made to interact with the visual track. This method often times ignores the physical actions in the film, and tends to react to the mood of the film. However, the two films that I would like to speak about tonight are Brilliant Noise (2006) and What the Water said.

Brilliant Noise is one of my favorite videos that I have seen. It consists of archival footage of NASA’s, I assume, raw satellite footage of the sun, and the solar flares that reach out to interrupt the black color of space. The beautiful imagery was enough for me, but the sound was also amazingly intriguing. I have earlier talked about how sound is synced up to match the video, and this case is no different. When images move the audio ‘moves’ with it. However, this sound is much more abstract. You do not hear the sounds that the actual sun is making, but you hear artificial sounds. Maybe artificial is not quite the word to use but I would say that these sounds were not created from the source that the camera was capturing at the time.

The astonishing images of the sun would sometimes jump. Maybe it was due to technical difficulties with the satellite being so far away to communicate with, but every time the image jumped this angelical ring would precisely fall into my ear. The edit and the sound both had something in common. The attack, sustain, and decay were expeditious. If the attack, sustain, and decay contained any variable in speed or placement the sound may not have seemed right to me. This sound is repeated throughout the film. The ambience in the film was “directly [translated by] the intensity of the brightness into audio manipulation.” (Experimental Tuesdays pamphlet) The way that I interpret this is the light was what affected the audio’s ambience. Again, to refer to my reference to the audio-visual dance form above the audio was interacting with the video through being ‘synced’. However, from what I got from the quote it leads me to believe the audio was created through some technical malfunction with the intense light reacting with the satellite. If anyone thinks I am wrong please correct, but either way the audio is still there to be one with the film not to contrast it.

The audio in this video had been organically created which brings me to my next film.

The film What the Water Said (2006-07) could technically be said to be created by a crab. The idea of taking film stock and placing it in the water where it is vulnerable to such creatures and elements like “salt water, sand, and rocks; as it was chewed by… crabs, fish, and underwater creatures” (Experimental Tuesdays pamphlet) is completely organic. The ocean created this series of six aquatic films. I am interested in this film because it almost seems like it had been synced up in most parts. When you see a big gash of black on the film emulsion you also hear as if it had been struck with a bludgeon object like a rock. The audio is directly related to the visual, the visual is the audio, or vice versa. Now this sound is not very abstract in the way that it is nothing new, but it is most certainly abstract how the sound was acquired. An image of a crab scratching the top layers of the emulsion off comes to mind when I think of the creation of this piece. The decay of salt water is the ambience. The light pebbles are the middle ground, and the orchestra of crustaceans is the highs and foreground of this piece. The visual is a multitude of the elements I have named above working with the same elements of visual to create audio thus making a complete audio-visual work.

Film Industry

Filmmaking today is dividing into many separate categories that will create sub genre's that may compete with mainstream media.

Reaction To The Sissy Gaze in American Cinema

My freshman year in film school I remember such topics as the male gaze or female gaze in film. The male gaze being the way our eye portrays women in film. We see them as advertisements, and the females notice the way that us men stare at them and treat themselves as objects also to use their looks as seductive power over men. The male gaze is very eminent in Hitchcock films. Rear Window is told almost purely through the eyes of the male role Jimmy Stuart. Hitchcock gives a lot of point of view shots to the male in his films.

However, I have never heard of the sissy gaze. The power of the sissy gaze comes from the “problems of Hollywood” today. According to Ray Davis the author of, The Sissy Gaze in American Cinema, people are challenging cinema constantly these days saying it is not what it used to be. Ray Davis has the solution for what is different about films. It is not that Hollywood has lost their ability to create original storyline, or use the same formula to create every film. It is that Hollywood has stopped using sissies in their films. Males with a feminine touch are the aspect that film does not have anymore. When Davis first proposed this I thought it was ridiculous, but then I reflected over my favorite films from early cinema. Davis used stars from the early star-cast system like Charlie Chaplin and buster Keaton “snapping a limp wrist” (Davis) constantly at the camera. One film in particular I think of is Modern Times with Charlie Chaplin especially in the beginning. Charlie is working along side this enormous masculine man who keeps threatening Charlie with his dominance. Keaton and Chaplin are both men that are relatively small and skinny, not exactly the Christian Bale’s or the multiple actors that interpreted the role of James Bond that we see today.

Even old German films from the German Expressionism era contained sissy men. In the film, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), directed by Robert Weine, the somnambulist Cesare is skinny, frail, and reminds most of us of a ballet dancer. Villains in more modern films contain masks of horror and body armor with chiseled abs. Or in the movie, Metropolis, by Fritz Lang, the main character seemed very ‘light’ for a man. The way he ran was quite off, and even the way he played games with the women around town was a little odd. However, later in film his feminine qualities were altered as he worked in the underground sweat shops.

I have always noticed that there was a certain politeness to films that has disappeared in the last few decades. I miss the strange courtesy in the relationship of Count Dracula and John Harker as Bela Lugosi welcomes his visitor to his home just before offering him a midnight snack. A strange atmosphere always surrounded the early actors of Hollywood, the way they dressed or moved. “Contemporary hard body stars are easy to picture in gay porn” (Davies) as they are continuously featured with their clothes off with bodies that are completely toned and perfect. The politeness that was once is no more in films with fighting machines like Will Smith in I Am Legend.

Finally, this is what I feel the Sissy Gaze is. In all films viewers must see the story through the eyes of one of the characters. The character is usually the one that embodies the viewer most accurately. We cannot relate to most Hollywood actors with superior genes and bodies that you only see in magazines. Most men in America are average; I guess that is why the term average is coined. We relate to the smaller gentlemen that are better at talking and being gentle, rather than the hyper-male that can do everything physically. Since less of us are relating to these hyper-masculine characters less of us are enjoying the Hollywood narrative.