The Music and Sound of Experimental Film

This book explores music/sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the USA through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, re-mediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological, aesthetic, tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walther Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of Vjing.

Holly Rogers is a senior lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Before this, she was the founding director of the Research Centre for Audio-Visual Media at the University of Liverpool, Fulbright Scholar at the DocFilm Institute in San Francisco and Research Fellow at the Humanities Institute of Ireland. Her primary interest lies in the relationship between sound and image in experimental film, video art and music video. Holly is the author Visualising Music: Audio-Visual Relationships in Avant-Garde Film and Video Art (2010) and Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (2013). She has also edited two books on audiovisual media: Music and Sound in Documentary Film (2014) and Transmedia Directors: Sound, Image and the Digital Swirl (with Carol Vernallis and Lisa Perrott, forthcoming). She is a founding editor for the book series New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media.

Jeremy Barham is Reader in Music at the University of Surrey. His academic interests lie in the areas of Mahler, 19th- and 20th-century Austro-German music and culture, screen music, and jazz. He has undertaken periods of archival research in Vienna, Philadelphia, Paris, Berlin, and Wiesbaden, and convened three international conferences, on Mahler (2011), early film music (2014) and the music and legacy of Miles Davis and John Coltrane (2016).