The Knight’s Move:
Tomorrow’s Popular Art (1992)

In memory of Ashley Crawford (1960-2025)

2026 Introduction: This piece from 1992 was my attempt to write an essay for the glossy, high-profile 21C magazine in Australia, a publication of Australia’s government-funded Commission for the Future (CFF) that functioned between 1985 and 1998. The editorial role of the magazine had, just prior my assignment, been put in the hands of the wily mover-and-shaker Ashley Crawford, for whom I had written a great deal in the the days of independent culture magazines The Virgin Press (1981-1983) and Tension (1983-1991) plus the short-lived Cut (1988) and Xpress (Melbourne version 1988) – and would later write again, in his World Art (1994-1998) period. 21C, however, was not primarily an art or cultural review, and – even with Ashley’s tenacious aid – I encountered a great deal of trouble getting this piece accepted at the highest, overseeing level of the Commission. Four different drafts ensued, and all were rejected as “not futuristic enough” (!) – until that fine day when the magazine’s resident designer (Terence Hogan, who had also migrated across from Tension) decided, on an inspired whim, to print out my 2nd draft in a jazzier font before showing it, once again, to the Big Boss. That different-looking version delighted her – indeed, it was “just what was needed”. What follows is my personal edit of the best material from all drafts. Some of its predictions (such as the sure-to-shrink standard length of feature films) are now merely quaintly amusing, and I betray at moments my slight uncertainty on how to ‘pitch’ this piece for the Commission – but the argument as a whole does connect to threads of my work on popular culture and on audiovisual aesthetics.

Every so often, one encounters a film or TV show that amorphously but unmistakably seems ahead of its time – both undeniably dazzling and faintly incomprehensible. Each individual’s list would be quite different, but in my viewing experience popular films including Tron (1982), Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), Electric Dreams (1984), just about any action-fantasy epic from Hong Kong, video art experiments like Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Mystery of Oberwald (1980) and Peter Greenaway’s A TV Dante (1990), off-the-wall TV programs like Maniac Mansion (1990-1993) and After Hours (1989-1990), plus any random assortment of music videos, have communicated this portentous feeling that they belong not to today’s but tomorrow’s general cultural consumption.

Whether a multi-million dollar blockbuster meant for a mass audience or a small-scale experimental work, one comes away from such mind-spinning audiovisual experiences with a sense that there was too much happening too quickly at too many levels at once – perhaps even that their basic messages are a little alien, indecipherable. Recall your first encounter with the original infotainment (information + entertainment) programs from USA, like Entertainment This Week and News Overnight. They are tame, familiar stuff to most of us now, but ten years ago it seemed like they were being beamed in from another planet.

Sometimes we can easily conclude that certain films or TV shows are so awesomely mind-boggling because, basically, they are just big, out-of-control messes. But, at other times, the thought naggingly persists that, if only we were seeing it ten years hence – when all films and TV shows are more or less exactly like it – it would make total sense. After all, history has a way turning the status quo around pretty damn quickly these days – particularly where popular culture is concerned. We might be seeing a glimpse of the future in action – omens of tomorrow’s popular art and entertainment.

Just think of the incredible changes that have overtaken popular music within a quite recent timespan. In the late 1970s, any young punk who dared to turn on a drum machine while he or she was nominally performing ‘live’ had to take cover from the beer bottles hurled by angry rockers. This machine epitomised, for some, an inhuman, unspontaneous, unfeeling approach to music making. By the mid 1980s, however, not only were most Top 40 hits and advertising jingles using some form of computerised, digitally produced rhythm – even your average over-50 Country’n’Western singer at the local pub (or random crooner soliciting for coins on public transportation) was casually punching up preselected beats with which to strum along.

So, as a rule, we should at least stay open to futuristic signs like these. Futurism in this sense (not to be confused with the specific 20th century art movement of that name) does not designate anything anything grand, apocalyptic or visionary. Many people mistakenly associate futurism in film and television only with science fiction visions like Max Headroom (1987-1988) or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). But a work does not literally have to be about the future in order to be futuristic. In fact, there are many portents of the future hidden in the unending stream of situation comedies, teenage fantasies, action movies and the like that flood our cinemas, video stores and TV sets every day and night.

Visions of the future date from a long way back in the past. Composer Richard Wagner once dreamed of the Total Art Work or Gesamtkunstwerk – a grand operatic form that would combine all the then-existing arts of theatre, design, painting and music. In Wagner’s vision, the total work of art would be rich – a total environment for the spectator, and a completely absorbing experience for the mind, senses and emotions.

To many cultural historians, the arrival of cinema at the dawn of this century promised just such a dizzy meeting-place for all the arts. In 1946, the pioneering French film theorist André Bazin envisaged a “myth of total cinema” driving all of the medium’s fanatical inventors – the dream of cinema as “the complete and total representation of reality”. (1) In the Marshall McLuhanesque fervour of the 1960s, Gene Youngblood predicted the growing development of an Expanded Cinema. In Youngblood’s view, cinema would longer be defined as celluloid going through a movie projector, but any combination, through any technological means, of sounds and images unfolding in time and space. (2)

Since then, the cinema has indeed expanded. Interacting with sophisticated video and computer processes, a Total Cinema has been glimpsed, for example, in the special 360 degree wrap-around presentations designed for Omnimax domes (three of which operated in Australia in the early ‘90s). In America, Disney theme parks exhibited Captain Eo (1986), a 3D science fiction short with theatrical laser effects, devised by George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Jackson. (3)

At another level, marginal avant-garde artists have been experimenting for at least 30 years with integrated, multi-media works, mixing music, slides, performance, designed environments and film. Some of these artists (such as Laurie Anderson) have crossed over to the world of rock music – a world with its own quasi-Wagnerian aspirations to total spectacle, as witnessed in the complex, computerised light shows that accompany bands such as Genesis.

All these examples are relatively isolated or specialist cultural events. The interesting question to consider is: will expanded or total cinema enter mainstream popular culture to the point of providing the norm for all movies and TV shows? And if so, what are we to make of this massive cultural transformation?

The florid Romanticism of Wagner – not to mention the spectacular vulgarity of much popular culture, from circuses to comic-strips – point toward a particular future for art and entertainment. Technology is accelerating the arrival of this future, in which creative works are above all else kinetic, dynamic, mixed, and immediately arresting. We could call it an art of effects, in two important senses. First, films and TV shows will be more and more the sum of special effects or formal manipulations. There is an urgent need today to comprehend this new intermeshing of aesthetic styles with technological trends. What does it really mean to suggest (a lament we so often hear) that all art is being overtaken by special effects (SPFX)?

Here is a way to approach and consider that question. The futuristic aspect of tomorrow’s popular art is to be found not so much in the content of film or TV productions (i.e., their obvious plots, settings and themes) but far more in their style or aesthetic. Style makes the artwork, no matter whether it receives the label of High or Low Art in terms of supposed cultural (and/or market) value. Style equals the look and sound of a production, its atmosphere and feel, scale and rhythm. Style is what leaves an indelible impression – conscious or unconscious – on the spectator: it is the realm of spine-tingling sound effects, breathtaking vistas, awe-inducing cascades of light or movement. Just ask Steven Spielberg!

Style is not a storyline, but the way that a story is told: how information is conveyed, how the viewer is drawn in (or thrown out), how the very surface of the movie, TV or computer screen is made inviting and spectacular. At least since Flashdance (1983) in cinema and Miami Vice (1984-1990) on TV, popular culture has been obsessed with pushing surface style to giddy extremes. By now, almost every kind of old-fashioned story type has been turned into some crazy hybrid of MTV – witness the impossibly youthful, high-energy undercover cops of 21 Jump Street (1987-1991) or the thrill-seeking, death-defying medical students of Flatliners (1990).

The Australian Classification (i.e., Censorship) Board has, in recent years, taken to warning us how impactful are particular films sitting in the video store. A high-impact rating conjures frightful extremes of bloody action, graphic violence, visual gore. Yet the typical high-voltage action movie of today may often contain very little explicit violence. What it usually does contain is a violent, impactful style: editing, sound effects, kinetic displays of colour and movement designed, as carefully and precisely as possible, to assault the viewer’s sensorium! I’ve seen even so-called professional reviewers walk out of a film such as Walter Hill’s Johnny Handsome (1989) while murmuring disagreeably about how shockingly violent it is – quite oblivious to the cinematic fact that there is more shouting, smashed glass and glinting knives than blood in it.

High-impact filmmaking these days is not only the province of the horror and action genres. Imagine Fatal Attraction (1987) – the story of a married man’s fling with a psychotic ‘other woman’ who threatens the sanctity of the Holy/happy nuclear family – as it would have been presented by Hollywood in the 1940s or ‘50s: most likely, as a niche ‘woman’s picture’ or romantic melodrama with mildly thrilling touches – but basically a quiet, reflective chamber drama morality tale featuring actors such as James Mason, Gene Tierney, Robert Ryan or Joan Fontaine in the leading parts.

In the 1980s, as directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Glenn Close and Michael Douglas, Fatal Attraction is full-on, shock-horror, high-impact filmmaking. (4) Every object in the hero’s environment looks and sounds frightening; even the simplest gesture shudders with dread and portent. With this demented heightening of all audiovisual surfaces comes a consequent scrambling of the expected moral emphases: now, nobody in the audience really knows anymore who to love and who to hate, of whom to disapprove and for whom to feel sorry. It has all become a huge, undifferentiated, confusing spectacle.

Still today, in writing classes and filmmaking schools, students are fed what are essentially 19th century protocols for designing a hallowed well-constructed story. These protocols include: the necessity for three acts, as in theatrical drama; a hero who struggles over adversity and wins – and thus a figure viewers like, and with whom they can identify; clear character motivation (goals, desires, evident and conscious drives); and, at the end, a clean resolution that unambiguously ties everything up. This once eminently respectable aesthetic is devoted to the harmony, balance and symmetry of all its elements, both of content and style. In short: the legacy of Classicism in art.

Naturally, hit movies and primetime TV programs are still made to the blueprint of these classical conventions. Heroes and happy endings leap out at us from everywhere, The Cosby Show (1984-1992) to The Rocketeer (1991). But as Fatal Attraction and so many other contemporary productions suggest, there’s another, rather more postmodern attitude in the air, one that is becoming more prevalent – and which, tomorrow, may be the cultural norm.

As popular culture becomes more stylish, spectacular and impactful, certain longstanding ways of telling stories ineluctably become outmoded. An idiot-grin amorality reigns as fictions get faster, dramatic acts (and arcs) collapse together, decors spin, and moments of high spectacle become abstract or cartoon-like.

Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Simpsons (1989-ongoing), Darkman (1990) and Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear (1991), to cite only four examples characteristic of the early ‘90s, are more interested in pursuing sensual and/or intellectual intoxication – styles and ideas sparking furiously, as in Wagner’s dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk – than any Classical dream of organic, controlled, refined expressivity. As the theorist-historian-critic-filmmaker Peter Wollen has suggested, it is only now, at the brink of the 21st century, that culture at large is making a veritable Knight’s Move away from the artistic rules and conventions of the 19th century. (5)

Today’s aesthetic surges and excesses can certainly be, at times, disconcerting. We need not fear that culture will convert wholesale to its avant-garde of amorality and all-stops-out spectacularity. There will always be a reassertion of model stories and the standard ways of telling them. But it’s a good principle to pay strict attention to the extremes of contemporary cultural production. Not only are they giving us a helpful glimpse at the potential norms and conventions of tomorrow’s popular art; they are also challenging us, in a salutary fashion, to think differently, to invent new concepts and attitudes adequate to a quickly changing world. Wollen puts it well: “We need an open aesthetics, future-oriented, to deal with an art which is still in process, not yet sedimented or stereotyped.” (6)

A key factor shaping tomorrow’s popular art is technology. A futuristic film or TV program of today is, sometimes, one that extends the creative, expressive possibilities of available technology. Take, for instance, the phenomenon of Spectral Recording (Dolby SR) used for the majority of contemporary film soundtracks, especially in the mainstream industry, since 1986. (7) A principal attribute of Spectral Recording is the ability to cleanly separate many simultaneous sounds and then spatialise them with great accuracy. Meaning: sounds can be placed exactly at specific points in the cinema auditorium (depending on how well-equipped it is!), thus creating a total sonic environment for the viewer with specific effects of shock, movement and atmospherics.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979/2001) was among the first films to literally surround the viewer with a complex soundscape – making us feel as if we were right in the Vietnam jungle along with the protagonists. A decade later, sound technology has gone so far as to have redefined (in part, at least) the very syntax of sound-and-image relations in cinema. In a previous era of film, the basic rule is evident: if you hear a distinctive or unusual sound, you will see its source either immediately, or after a moment’s tease (a device often used in thrillers). In 1992, however, sound has been, in some cases, cut completely free from its grounding in the image. (8)

One of the most striking moments in Joe Dante’s delirious Gremlins 2 comes when the Brain gremlin – a cartoonish creation who sings “New York, New York” with comedian Tony Randall’s voice – melts to death. As he disappears, a few ghostly words from his signal tune seem to float somewhere in the middle of the cinema auditorium, as if projected like a comic-strip thought-balloon directly out of his head. This happens fleetingly, in the midst of a vast cacophony of noise and music. It is in fact quite easy to miss, because it is not cued for our attention the way such an effect would be in a more conventional movie. Yet the popular audiovisual entertainment of tomorrow will undoubtedly be full of such split-second, complexly engineered effects.

From a more general perspective, one of the most important intersections of style and technology has come about precisely because of what has been dubbed our emergent age of sampling. The sampling phenomenon is by now familiar from popular music. Elements of pre-existing tracks are selected (sampled), stored, treated and edited to the extent that whole musical works can be routinely built up without a single new sound being performed in a studio.

Wollen proposes that this is a logical development in a technological society based on massive “information storage”, photography, audio and videotape leading to that greatest storer of all: the computer. “We can expect the production of both image and sound to become more and more a matter of combining and altering already existing images and sounds extracted from one or other information store”. (9)

Film and TV have not yet been able to go as far as popular music in this direction, but all the signs clearly point this way. Virtually all TV news and current affairs programs, for instance, have rapidly become archive-mad, pulling out every ‘great newsworthy moment’ available in the video files and flipping, colourising, freezing, looping it. A more technologically advanced example: Time magazine profiled the latest Diet Coke commercial created by Lintas Advertising in USA, for which images of Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney were digitally taken from old movies and seamlessly stitched into new footage – so that the stars of yesteryear could interact with those of today.

Speaking of his art-extravaganza Prospero’s Books (1991), Peter Greenaway asserted that what drew him to the project was the possibility of exploring further the “television post-production techniques” that he broached in A TV Dante; i.e., the ability to layer and alter imagery through the digital manipulations allowed by computer and video. This includes, for instance, the capacity to call up visual ‘footnotes’ within an image – opening smaller ‘windows’ within the primary frame, as on a computer. It also includes the awesome ability to alter any object’s colour or shape as it occurs in nature – utilised by Antonioni in The Mystery of Oberwald to modulate photographic images of trees and grass in a deliberately irreal, painterly fashion.

Greenaway’s eulogising of the post-production phase – everything that begins once the raw material is stored – itself indicates a major shift in the aesthetic of our times. For the great arts of the 20th century, the emphasis has often been on the ‘shooting’ moment of production: photojournalism’s capture of the decisive moment, or Hollywood’s enshrinement of the magical performance of a sublime movie star before the camera. Such art believes in a life force, a complex, pre-existing reality, which can be caught and enhanced by art or media, but is fundamentally bigger than both.

Approaching the 21st century, however, we encounter a quite contrary reverie. The material stored in the vast audio-visual archive is not vital and unrepeatable but simply inert data – raw, not yet cooked – which awaits animation. Indeed, in a slightly spooky, Frankenstein’s creature-like fashion pointed to by the aforementioned Diet Coke commercial, we could even say it is dead matter awaiting post-production re-animation. For, as the important Australian publication The Illusion of Life (edited by Alan Cholodenko for Sydney’s Power Institute) has persuasively argued, animation is no longer simply the province of cartoons. Some of the most engaging characters of early ‘90s movies – from the wise, mystical rat in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) to Thing in The Addams Family (1991) – are wholly fabricated animatronic creations, elaborate mixtures of puppetry, animation and various other digital special effects processes.

This is nothing new per se. King Kong and Godzilla, in their various incarnations, were also special effects that managed to win our sympathy and admiration. What is different in today’s popular culture is that the entire universe in which such characters move tends to be an artificial, animated paradise. Films including Crimewave (1985), Evil Dead II (1987) and Beetlejuice (1988) take as their main subject the strange ecstasy of dead matter which is fleetingly re-animated and hurled around the screen. The human element so beloved of previous art forms seems suddenly reduced.

It is hard to hold back the dream – or nightmare – that, with the aid of advanced technology, the dead movie stars of yesteryear could be not merely integrated into new films like so many Roger Rabbits, but actually made to deliver new performances, speaking new lines in new situations. All those cultists worshipping the memories of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison could be taken to new and unspeakable heights of necrophiliac ecstasy ...

Coming back to earth somewhat, in what context can we properly evaluate the increasing diminution of the human element in tomorrow’s popular art? Basically, we are facing the prospect of cultural forms that are more artificial, controlled, pre-planned and contrived than ever before. French film critic Serge Daney put it well in his comparison of Coppola’s futuristic opus One From the Heart (1982) with the old Hollywood musicals to which it alludes. Whereas once upon a time “decors and characters still belonged to the same world, were on the same wavelength, ‘enchanted’ each other reciprocally”, now “nothing happens to human beings, but everything happens to images”. (10) Everything is made into a manipulable image or object – human bodies as much as items of the decor. The master-manipulator’s animation of lights, sets, bodies and sounds can count for our total cinematic experience.

But never entirely total. The great Italian stage-and-screen director Luchino Visconti once declared in his 1943 manifesto-statement on Anthropomorphic Cinema: “I could make a film in front of a bare wall, if I was able to find the true material of humanity to place against this naked, cinematographic element: find it, and tell it.” (11) It is doubtful that this essential aspect – show business grasped in its most eloquent sense – will ever disappear entirely from popular art. Let’s hope not, anyhow; the human element will certainly never be wholly calculated, simulated or second-guessed by the digital manipulation of inert data. Although the archive fever of current film and TV is tending toward a very high degree of recycling and self-reference, we can be sure that this closed audiovisual circuit will inevitably wear out, from time and time, and require recharging with a strong dose of complex reality.

Then again, perhaps we are even entering a time when the director or auteur will no longer be the sole master-manipulator. Paul Brown, an Australian expert on computer art, has imagined how, with imminent advances in the technologies enabling virtual space, we will have “live representational or abstract movies that you can interact with and live within”. This will come about in its most extreme form once computers are directly linked to the human brain, because an individual’s very vision will then be directly open to control and manipulation. Here, the human element returns with a vengeance – to the point of usurping the traditional role of the artist, and of art as finished form, altogether.

This seems like a rather privatised vision – a world of atomised individuals each hooked up to their personal technology (prefigured, it seems, in the cult of the stereo Walkman). The expanded cinema of tomorrow (taken in all its video and computer-based forms) will undoubtedly have this individual application, but it will probably never lose, at its other extreme, contact with large audience groups in theatrical settings. Popular art will always be performative, always needing and aiming to incite the collective vibe that only a packed house offers.

This is the next major aspect of tomorrow’s art of effects – the physical and emotional responses or affects that can be engendered, even engineered in audiences. There have been crude attempts, down the years, at creating actual physical sensations for a cinema audience – ‘feelies’ with tingling seats, or Smell-O-Vision odours let into the auditorium at key moments of the plot. But it is the viewer’s imagination that will remain the royal road through which tomorrow’s popular culture must travel – an imagination prompted by a battery of powerfully enhanced, emotionally intoxicating, artistic and technical effects. TV and cinema are likely to stay on-screen spectacles, fundamentally separate from the personal spaces (or neuronal brain circuits) of viewers – but doing everything they can to imaginatively bridge that immutable physical distance.

In the area of literature, people have begun to talk of fast fiction – novels like Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991) that ape cinematic techniques, and even, at the local Hypermarket, pocket-size, seemingly author-less books that offer all the basic ingredients of The Western (a sample genre) packed into 60 very odd pages. The expanded cinema of tomorrow will respond to this shift by itself becoming even faster. In movies, we will see the very definition of feature length gradually mutate, leaving the standard 90-minute-to-2-hour format an outmoded relic of the 20th century. Australian directors Aleksi Vellis (Nirvana Street Murder, 1990) and Philip Brophy have publicly stated their belief that feature films for mass consumption are about to shrink to perhaps 40 minutes in length. Their own films – kinetic, spectacular, crammed with narrative information at breakneck speed – give an indication of what is in store.

Futuristic prediction about audiovisual media sometimes goes too far over the top. We are not really likely to see a complete conversion of popular culture to the cutting edge we see at work today. There will be a reassertion of the old-fashioned stories, and the old-fashioned ways of telling them. Art and entertainment will retain a fine sense of show-business communication. Let’s hope so, anyway; the human element can never be wholly calculated, simulated or second-guessed by digital manipulation of inert matter. And reality will always be greater and more complex than anything that can be contained within the circuits of an artificial intelligence.

What we are seeing, as we face the art and entertainment of the next century, is a realignment or rapprochement between two tendencies which have for so long been at war in our society. We can turn once more to Wollen for an elucidation of this, especially in his historical study of a constellation he labels “cinema/Americanism/the robot”. (12) In his view, all futuristic speculation on art and culture can be fruitfully seen as a charged episode in the history or reason, or rather rationality. Reason has branched in two, mutually impoverished directions.

On the one hand, we have man-made technology, big on data, binary codes, instant retrieval systems, progress and efficiency – but very uncomfortable with the chaotic messiness of desires, hopes, anxieties, fantasies, i.e., everything that goes with art, creativity or enjoyment. That is the largely masculine system of logicist rationalism, which has led to the assembly line, structuralist philosophy and the computer.

On the other hand, we have a certain ancient, entrenched vision of art and art-making as pure entities, unsullied by commerce, technology or mere spectacle. That retrograde notion incites a paranoiac, panic-flight reaction to technology and rigid logic; it leads to the irrationalism evident in, variously, the many vain attempts to return to the primitive in art; the poststructuralist flirtation with nonsense and madness; and the worst hippie-mystical manifestations of the New Age (themselves returning us, along one path, to a sorry ‘Iron John’ masculinism).

There are now early, happy signs that this dichotomy is breaking down, and will continue to do so with ever greater speed. Wollen relishes the irony that it is the computer itself which may bring about this rapprochement. Technology and creativity are beginning to engage with each other in new, more equal ways. Advanced computer art and popular culture are starting to offer surprising and useful hybrids of reality and fancy, logic and nonsense, advanced technology and artistic intuition. Wollen has his practical shot at imagining and conjuring such a hybrid in his brainy sci-fi chamber feature, Friendship’s Death (1987). Things are certainly changing when digital artist Linda Dement can exclaim:

I love being able to enter into the computer a confusion of memories, pictures, fabrications and idiocy. I can manipulate and work on them out there in non- existent space then see it appear on the screen with the weight of fact, technology and money. (13)

Popular culture, too, offers surprising, useful hybrids of reality and fancy, logic and nonsense, advanced technology and artistic intuition. It has, indeed, always done so – it’s in the very nature of the beast. The siren call of nostalgia may lure us into romanticising Old Hollywood or the Golden Years of Television (when were those years, exactly?) as supposedly simpler, more innocent cultural expressions – but they, too, displaced older aesthetic forms and entrenched ways of thinking in the process of forging the mass media culture of the 20th century. Some lost, lonely souls are still struggling to fully comprehend and live with that culture. Good luck to them, I say – they’ll need it, in light of all that’s ahead.

On the eve of the next Knight’s Move, we must be collectively ready to take up Wollen’s challenge to “think through the nature of these new systems of signs and meanings, and the new aesthetic and political questions they provoke”. (14) Because the grand old classical forms of the 19th century may turn out be cold comfort when we are mired deep in the complexities of a radically new world.

NOTES (2026)
1. André Bazin, What is Cinema? (Caboose, 2009), p. 15. back

2. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (Littlehampton Book Services, 1971). back

3. Captain Eo played in this context from 1986 to 1998, returned as a Jackson tribute in 2010, and was consigned to the archive after a final screening in 2015 – replaced by the spectacle Stitch Encounter. back

4. See Beth Spencer’s creative 1994 essay “Fatal Attraction in Newtown”, reprinted in the author’s 2018 collection The Age of Fibs & Other Stories (Spineless Wonders). back

5. Peter Wollen, “Ways of Thinking About Music Video (and Post-Modernism)”, Critical Quarterly, Vo.28 No. 1 & 2 (1988), p. 170. back

6. Ibid. back

7. See the extensive analysis of this technique by Philip Brophy (1990), “The Architecsonic Object: Stereo Sound, Cinema and Colors”, https://philipbrophy.com/projects/chapters/architectsonicobject/chapter.html. back

8. Michel Chion’s work, in reviews, essays and books, has patiently and tirelessly charted and commented upon these changes. See, for instance, his The Voice in Cinema and Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, both translated by Claudia Gorbman for Columbia University Press. back

9. Wollen, “Ways of Thinking”, p. 169. back

10. Serge Daney, “One from the Heart”, Framework, no. 32 & 33 (1986), p. 173. back

11. Visconti’s text remains untranslated into English, but I offer a summary of and commentary on it in my Filmmakers Thinking (Sticking Place, 2024). back

12. Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (Verso, 1993). back

13. Linda Dement, Agenda, no. 20 & 21 (November 1991). back

14. Wollen, “Thinking Theory”, Film Comment (August 1988), p. 51. back

© Adrian Martin January 1992 (+ 2026 Notes)