Lessons of Noise and Silence:
Avant-garde Cinema and
Experimental Music in Australia

Introduction October 2024: I have written extensively, over the past 45 years, on experimental cinema – with a particular emphasis on Australia’s contribution to this field. Most of my work in this area is, today, invisible (an exception from 1989 can be found here), since it usually appears in festival catalogues, screening program booklets, obscure academic journals, art books, and small-run, tiny-circulation print magazines – and because Australia has only rarely been included/actively curated in the international circuits of avant-garde film (which is, in general, a fiercely territorial scene). As the recent Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema (2024) – even in its tri-authored chapter on Australia! – makes no mention of my writing (beyond a modest 1980s booklet that I edited), I have decided to republish some of this work here on my website. The following is an essay initially commissioned for a French publication titled Le cinéma critique (part of the Sorbonne’s Histo.Art book series) in 2006.

During the 1970s, one did not hear much music in Australian avant-garde films. A certain purity and austerity reigned; silence was favoured, as in the American films of Stan Brakhage. This is the case in many works by Arthur and Corinne Cantrill (Waterfall, 1984), John Dunkley-Smith (Down by the Station, 1977) and other major figures of the time. In fact, this virtual blackout on music in avant-garde cinema is drolly indicated by an anecdote from the early 1980s.

A young university student embarked on a lengthy, detailed, textual analysis of the Cantrills’ film Negapositive (1975), a reworking of images from the legendary anthropologist-biologist-ethnologist Walter Baldwin Spencer (1860-1929); just prior to publication, the editors showed the text to the filmmakers. The Cantrills were unhappy, because they immediately realised two things: i) The student had obviously watched a video, and the filmmakers (again, like Brakhage in that period) expressly forbid all video reproduction of their films; and ii) The student had mistaken the various random, static noises that somehow deposited themselves on the video for an ingenious musique concrète soundtrack, and analysed the image-sound counterpoint accordingly. At the express request of the Cantrills, the text appeared in print with all references to this phantom soundtrack heavily blacked-out. (1)

There are many aesthetic and political reasons why avant-garde filmmakers have, at certain times and in certain conjunctures, embraced silence and suppressed the use of sound: to refer back to the silent era of cinema; to protest against the arbitrary ‘marriage’ of image and sound enforced by the film industry; to return the spectator to the consciousness and rhythms of their own body; to allow the creation of a live soundtrack in an expanded cinema performance event; and to stress the multiple, virtual rhythms inherent in the silent image and its montage, which are able to be activated only in the spectator’s mind.

Nonetheless, it is unusual and somewhat puzzling that the seeming ban on sound – and on music, particularly – could have taken such a hold of the Australian avant-garde at the end of the 1960s virtually through to the beginning of the ‘80s. This is particularly so when we look back to one of the great pioneers of the Australian and New Zealand avant-garde: Len Lye. In his work from the 1930s onwards (such as Rainbow Dance [1936] and Swinging the Lambeth Walk [1939]), we find brilliant fusions of animated imagery and music of many kinds (classical, jazz, experimental, pop). Indeed, it is an interesting loop of film history that, in 2002, the celebrated rock musician Ed Kuepper (of The Saints and Laughing Clowns fame) decided to tour a show in which he performed his music live to match the large-screen projection of Lye’s films – which had been stripped of their original soundtracks for this occasion.

A more general observation about the relationship of experimental music and avant-garde cinema deepens the mystery. It is a simple, observable fact that – like in many countries – many experimental filmmakers in Australia are also deeply involved in avant-garde music of various kinds; if not, they collaborate closely with avant-garde musicians and composers in their specific cultural milieux. There are also cases of avant-garde filmmakers who take up music precisely because they have been led to it through the work they do in cinema (such as James Clayden, discussed below); and, conversely, of avant-garde composers inevitably finding their way into the realms of experimental film and video (such as David Chesworth).

I would like to propose a general aesthetic and conceptual framework in which to discuss the relationship of music to image within experimental film. This framework rests on the concept of aesthetic hierarchy: in any given film form, are some elements made subservient to others? Which elements take the dominant or foreground position? Which elements are we meant to notice, and which are meant to slip into the background? Is this hierarchy ever contested, reversed, complicated, abolished?

The question of hierarchy is especially pertinent to the discussion of image-sound relationships since, in the commercial mainstream film industry, sound has often been referred to as the slave of the image, or the seemingly unnoticed part of the material whole. Of course, astute commentators including Philip Brophy, Michel Chion, François Thomas and Rick Altman have shown us, since the ‘80s, that sound is never really secondary, in its effect and importance, to the image – and the mainstream cinema itself, in that same period, has (literally) amplified the place of sound and music on the aesthetic, technological and marketing planes. Nonetheless, it remains difficult to entirely dislodge the popular primacy accorded to the image in cinema.

The realm of avant-garde production routinely opposes the classical-industrial aesthetic economy – but, as we shall see, it invents its own economies. Within each category, we will briefly see how the example of Australian experimental cinema has shifted and mutated from the 1960s to the present day. (2)

My six categories are constructed on three variables: whether the music is performed live, or pre-recorded; whether music accompanies the images, or vice versa; and whether the relationship of image and music is one that is (in terms I will explain) loosely set, completely unset, or tightly fused.

1. Images as Accompaniment to Live Music
In the 1960s in Australia – as part of the same historic conjunction of liberated conceptions of film and music seen throughout the world in this period – artists were inspired by the experiments of Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable events. Thus, film was widely used as a backdrop of silent images projected behind or over rock bands in performance (indeed, sometimes referred to admiringly or derisively as wallpaper imagery). I describe this aesthetic economy, in short hand, as images as accompaniment to live music.

In the ‘60s and ‘70s, these images ranged from representational material to various hippie/counterculture graphics (the peace symbol, the clenched fist of revolt), iconography (the ubiquitous mandala, precursor of today’s Mandelbrot fractals), and Pop Art-inspired comics (Robert Crumb, the Australian Martin Sharp).

There was also a more abstract variation of this practice, which became very popular, and a significant art form in itself, in the early ‘70s: the development of the choreographed or semi-improvised light show during musical performance, using a combination of lasers, colour filters, timers, non-representational imagery, and so on; the Australian pioneer in this field was Hugh McSpedden, and his work was later rediscovered by the Rave generation. (3) Eventually, this lo-tech innovation would become a standard part of hi-tech mainstream rock presentation – minus (for the most part) its eccentric and experimental aspects.

As well as becoming an integral part of nightclub culture in the ‘80s – where images truly became an indifferent wallpaper – the visual backdrop became a part of many elaborate concert performances by rock, New Wave and techno music groups, such as Laughing Hands (whose member Paul Schutze went on to work as composer and sound designer in art cinema in the UK) and Vince Giarrusso (of The Underground Lovers). Inspired by the imagery of the road movie and science fiction genres, a certain floating, long-take, ambient imagery tended to be favoured in such presentations: travelling views down highways, futuristic architecture.

A far more anarchic variant of the performance/image relation was proposed by the Jack Smith-style shows by Maj Green and Ewan Cameron during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s (such as Monsterous Maniacs and Dolls Vomit, both 1992), where highly histrionic Super-8 images of dress-ups play-acting would accompany, in a largely unplanned and random way, the equally extravagant display on stage, including in-process painting or object assemblage – a process described by the artists as “the collision”. (4)

Also in the early days of Australian experimental Super-8 at the start of the 1980s – it is important to realise that what was regarded by some, at the time, as the exhausted wave of the ‘70s avant-garde was almost exclusively filmed, exhibited and distributed on 16 millimetre – artists played with a variation of the loose, expanded-cinema encounter between a stream of images and a stream of sound: simply by playing, in a live or spontaneous selection, cassettes on a humble, domestic tape recorder during a screening – this was before the (possibly) more sophisticated, and certainly more technically refined, practices of DJ mixing became a widespread and popular option.

In a sense, this primitive practice sought to recapture one of the primal, fundamental pleasures that every fledgling filmmaker experiences: the thrill when some random piece of music is thrown at a set of images, and something, for some fleeting, unsynchronised moments, clicks or works. This was, itself, the continuation of a domestic game which many then and since know well: the random playing of records to a broadcast, mainstream television signal that is zapped with the sound off (and with or without drug or alcohol enhancement). Delightful chance collisions can occur in this situation; alas, they are generally unrepeatable, and can only be the inspiration or raw material for a truly aesthetic practice of image and sound.

2. Live Music as Accompaniment to Images
In this category, the previous aesthetic hierarchy is reversed, although both the live performance and expanded-cinema aspects remain. Images provide not the backdrop but now the foreground; the band is no longer visually prominent or necessarily even visible – especially during the ‘80s, when musicians such as Use No Hooks, inspired by Situationist theory, openly questioned the spectacular element of rock music mythology and sought to suppress it, as well as frustrating audience expectations, by various means (such as, in the manner of The Sex Pistols, turning their backs on the audience or performing behind a screen or curtain).

The live music that accompanies these images is not tightly scored or pre-planned (as in the clichéd silent movie piano/organ or trad jazz doodlings by groups such as Blue Grassy Knoll [active until 2015] that lamentably accompany Buster Keaton comedies in Australia; or the more ambitious but just as conventional Philip Glass/Kronos Quartet scores that accompany Murnau films in live concert settings). Rather, this variant is improvised according to certain inspired, playful whims and strategies.

Some examples. An art event at a Melbourne nightclub in the mid ‘90s, curated by progressive opera composer Jonathan Mills, collected a group of films – including a minimalist, abstract line-animation by the significant Australian sculptor, Neil Taylor – and then invited various musical performers to add a live, improvised accompaniment, whether by voice, traditional instrumentation, synthesised electronics or DJ-style sampling and mixing of pre-existing music tracks. The OFF: Otherfilm Festival in Brisbane during March 2006 offered performances including the ensemble Vanilla, juxtaposing shadow puppetry by animator Van Sowerwine and “live noise constructions” by industrial-music composer Camilla Hannan; a “spontaneous soundtrack” by the “unhinged psych” band The Lost Domain to Dirk de Bruyn’s Memorium (2006); and a collaboration employing “multiscreens, voice and unique projections” by animator Pia Borg and Mark Harwood.

Note, here, the crucial tradition of experimental animation in Australian avant-garde cinema, from Michael Lee and (in a more abstract vein) de Bruyn in the ‘70s via Neil Taylor in the ‘80s and ‘90s through to the disquieting Quay/Švankmajer mode of Sowerwine and Borg today: their respective films Clara (which screened in Cannes in 2005) and Footnote (2004) are among the best Australian works, in any format, of the 2000s.

The art ensemble Arf Arf participated in the Jonathan Mills event. The work of its members (Marcus Bergner, Marisa Stirpe, Richard Frenken, Michael Buckley and Frank Lovece [1956-2018]), achieved both individually and collectively – and across all the categories proposed in this essay – deserves special mention. These artists emerged from the highly contrarian Little Bands scene of the early ‘80s in Melbourne, bringing together their Lettrist-influenced notion of incidental art (their theatrical performances had no clear boundaries, they began and continued off-stage, and incorporated the smallest chance elements or accidents) with the anti-spectacular practice of erasing their bodies, to exist as pure voices or sounds in a space defined by projected images (live and animated) on 16 millimetre or Super-8.

In Arf Arf’s magnificent film Thread of Voice (1993) – which takes its place among the masterpieces of the Australian avant-garde – we receive glimpses of their performance items where live vocal music is creatively keyed to various prompts and cues provided in the image: for example, a scene where license plates from cars are animated on a sliding graph, offering nonsensical syllables as well as indeterminate notes and pitches, creating a splendidly absurdist cacophony. (5)

3. Pre-recorded Music Set to Images
Once sound and image are technically joined together (rather than being kept as separate, autonomous entities, as in the expanded live-performance-plus-projection situation), a number of further aesthetic options present themselves. The first is, simply, that a piece of pre-recorded music (whether already well-known, found in some obscure archive, or especially composed), used in whole or in part, is laid over or under a stream of images, in either correspondence or counterpoint to the mood or intention of those images. This is what I define as a loose setting rather than a tight fusion. We might say that, in this mode, music functions as a bed for the images. This is the dominant image-music relationship of mainstream, narrative cinema and (even more so) television – but it is also prevalent, not always to happy effect, in much avant-garde cinema.

In the travel films (such as The Becak Driver, 1998) made on Super-8 by the Cantrills during the 1980s and ‘90s, samples of local, Asian folk music simply accompany the poetically photographed, documentary views. Or – and this has become a standard option for many filmmakers – images are best served by a Brian Eno-like ambient soundtrack that allows for a loose fit between the floating tonal clusters of the soundtrack (somewhere between music proper and pure sound) and the défilement of the imagery.

In the ‘80s, composer-filmmaker Chris Knowles (Doctor Dark, 1984) became a leading exponent of half-ambient, half-techno soundtracks for his own works and those of others: for instance, his music for Nick Ostrovskis (Brain Surge, 1992), whose hallucinatory, kinetic, usually silent collages mix zoom-ins to re-photographed slides of brightly coloured flowers with flashes of domestic, autobiographical Polaroid photos. Ostrovskis’ work (which also featured in Mills’ 1990s event) presents, in fact, an intriguing crossover case between different image-sound economies. Most of his films have been made and presented without any sound whatsoever, and indeed elicited this perceptive praise from the multimedia artist Maeve Woods.

It’s been exciting to see Nick Ostrovskis’ silent films which are so daring and yet elegantly put together … The success of these films is partly in the pace of changes and the intrepid use of saturated hues. Because there is no auditory experience, I for one tune into something which is not music but a kind of meta-music when I see Nick’s films. (6)

4. Images Set to Pre-recorded Music
The reverse of the above mode has sometimes existed in avant-garde cinema: namely, a situation where the music exists first, as a found object or well-known piece, and a lyrical or jagged stream of loosely illustrative images are provided as the bed for that sound. This seems to be especially popular in episodic or anthology films (such as Aria, 1987), or in supposedly progressive television programming – for example, in arts slots where classical or modern experimental music is featured, and filmmakers are asked to illustrate it, or in some way respond to the feelings or thoughts prompted in them by the music.

An outstanding example of this practice from UK television is In Absentia (2000) – not to be confused with James Clayden’s 2007 short film of the same name – for the series Sound on Film International. This is a puppet animation by the Quay brothers commissioned to accompany a piece by Stockhausen – which the filmmakers felt to be “as if it was saturated in electricity”. (7) An extreme extension of the principle of the image-bed was proposed by Marguerite Duras in Son nom de Vénise dans Calcutta Désert (1976), where the entire soundtrack of India Song (1975) – voices, sounds and music included – was detached for the sake of a new set of accompanying (and mostly dark, unpopulated) images.

Of course, ‘images set to pre-recorded music’ also serves as a perfect definition of the commercial-industrial music video clip format. Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964) blazed the trail in this area, as did, in another way, Lye’s more abstract commercials for cigarettes and the like in the ‘30s. Indeed, one of the finest precursors of the modern rock video is to be found in the Australian avant-garde classic The Mystical Rose (1976) by Michael Lee – a grand exception in that more usually silent decade – where the transgressive, anti-religious cut-out imagery is exactly and hilariously synchronised to Gary Glitter’s campy cover of the doo-wop pop classic, “Donna”.

Avant-garde production in the ‘80s was inspired by the progressive possibilities of the music video form, and some experimental filmmakers were, indeed, hired by rock bands to supply their characteristic images. One such “visual album” project by the band INXS (for their 1993 album Full Moon, Dirty Hearts) was made in collaboration with the Ghost Pictures team of Richard Lowenstein, Lynn-Maree Milburn and Andrew de Groot – INXS front-man Michael Hutchence had starred in Lowenstein’s cult feature film Dogs in Space (1986) inspired by the Little Bands milieu, and collaborated with William Burroughs-influenced experimental musician Ollie Olsen [1958-2024]. In this project, various avant-garde techniques and styles were mimicked, and the well-known indigenous multi-media artist Tracey Moffatt devised a humorous pastiche-tribute to Angela Davis and the Black Power movement for the song “The Messenger”.

However, it is more usual for avant-garde filmmakers since the ‘80s simply to borrow songs or music tracks in order to set their own images against them. One of the most outstanding examples of this practice, emerging from the Super-8 Metaphysical Cinema group in Sydney during the ‘80s, was Catherine Lowing, whose kinetic and rhythmic sense, as well as the range of visual iconography she drew upon in short works including Knife in the Head, Spooky (1985), was constantly surprising and delightful. Lowing ceased filmmaking in the 1990s and, after making an unsuccessful (and largely unseen) pilot for a wacky TV cooking show, later worked in international public relations at Cinecittà.

                                                                     Entr’acte: The Debate over Rhythm
Certain avant-garde film artists who emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s were heavily influenced by the work and practice of John Cage. His philosophies and processes of chance creation, and his practice of music which is not necessarily melodic or strictly rhythmic (although Cage excluded no musical or sonic parameter a priori), fed into the work of film and video artists who favoured visual abstraction set to ambient styles of music.

A prominent example of someone coming from experimental music into video art (as well as Super-8 film) is the American-born composer Warren Burt, who studied under the Cagean Kenneth Gaburo, and has been resident in Australia since 1975. He is a pioneer in the use of computers in microtonal musical composition and an explorer of chance generators of artworks. In pieces such as For Ives and Jobim (1983), Burt developed a form of abstract video in which his music was fed into an early model of the Fairlight Synthesizer, creating unforeseen and unpredictable patterns of shape and colour – hypnotically vivid works, completely severed from the temporal restrictions of most film and video.

The work of James Clayden (Corpse [1982], The Ghost Paintings [1986-2003]) is more tied to narrative, figuration and representation – albeit in highly cryptic, attenuated forms. However, the particular version of musical culture that he draws on is equally indebted to Cage. The music/sound he creates (as part of the group Ad Hoc) is predominantly in the ambient, floating, atonal mode. “I have no training and can’t read or write music,” he explains.

I got interested in recording and mixing sounds in about 1969, when I came across John Cage’s writings and music, which were inspirational in practice, attitude and thought processes. The way I work now with music is that it seems to come during the editing process; I then record it and or mix it to the picture. I play the piano to a certain theme/mood in my head that keeps coming. I’d say I improvise when playing, but sometimes it seems to already exist.

As in the work of Philippe Grandrieux – to which Clayden’s films bear a remarkable (and wholly unintentional) affinity – atonal sounds are also abstracted and remixed from the real sound taken on the shoot, such as voices and atmospheric noises: “In The Marey Project (2005), I used a digital/computer system (Final Cut Pro) and most of the sustained drones, etc., were sourced from voices/sounds within the film itself.” (8)

A crucial, polemical dividing line between artists influenced by Cage (or by free jazz) and the generations that emerged in the 1980s and beyond is indicated by starkly different approaches to the question of rhythm – which is a profoundly cinematic, as well as musical, question.

Composers such Burt opposed the tyranny of rigid, fixed beat in music (to the point of labelling it fascist!), preferring the polyrhythms of jazz, or the arrythm of ambient sound. Naturally, the generation that grew up on disco and rap music – and which was soon to greet the techno-mechanisation of all beats in digital music production with glee – felt otherwise.

In relation to cinema, the adherents of Cage certainly made an important point: when a fixed beat locks on to a flow of images, it can so easily flatten the delicate, multiple rhythms already at play in the image – a fact easily and sadly proven by the many poor live or recorded musical accompaniments today soldered onto silent classics, often at their aesthetic expense. This criticism was also made of Ed Kuepper’s rock-derived block-rhythms, which seem so at odds with the sinuous, variable, dance-like rhythms of Len Lye’s imagery.

However, the cinematic possibilities of rhythm – in terms of a beat or pulse – are not so easily dispensed with. One possibility, pioneered by Godard in the early 1960s, is the breaking down of a beat into tiny, manageable fragments; unable, at that restricted length, to take command of the montage, the music can be controlled and manipulated to create specific, punctual moments of image-sound fusion.

This early, savage form of musical sampling was carried on in the Australian Super-8 work of Paul Fletcher in the ‘80s (Space Mutants, 1982) and Melanie El Mir in the ‘90s (Eggbound, 1995) – both exponents of a loose grunge/funk school of deliberate amateurism. They exploited the technical limitations of Super-8 mixing, overloading the music and voice overdubs on the fragile audio strip to create a musical collage that constantly swallowed itself, sonically, in a process of perpetual self-disintegration.

Even in its more holistic, music-video form, a pulse-like beat (and all the possibilities it creates for visual montage on and off that beat) is central to the Super-8 films of Lowing, to some works by Michael Lee (such as A Contemplation of the Cross [1989] with its sacred-style, ritualistic drum beat) and especially in the œuvre of Philip Brophy, whose Ads (1982) and Club Video (1986) are elaborate re-edits (from, respectively, television advertisements and classic movies) inventively assembled to a driving beat (in music expressly composed by the director for this purpose). After watching Words in my Head Voices in my Head (Anna) (2004), I asked Brophy about – as it seemed to me – his deft micro-matching of beats (composed, in this instance by Leigh Ryan aka Plutonic Lab) and spoken words; he replied that he simply (more or less) pitted one thing against the other – a principle of aesthetic simultaneity that he has explored, theoretically and practically, at length. (9)

5. Radical Non-Synchronisation of Image and Sound
Returning to our taxonomy of image-sound economies, we can also imagine – although examples are relatively rare in avant-garde cinema internationally – a complete and dedicated non-synchronisation of image and sound, not in the typically Godardian sense of fragmented voice-over narrations and the like, but a radical divorce between images proceeding on one track and sound proceeding on another track altogether, without any clear instants of conjunction or counterpoint (eg., an ironic juxtaposition) that illuminate the intention of the image-versus-sound plan – therefore, in my terms, an absolutely unset relation. This would be an extreme example of the Cagean notion of randomness – popularised especially by Brian Eno with his prescription of what he called oblique strategies for generating artworks by chance collisions of diverse materials – or of the Lettrist notion of discrepant cinema.

In practice, few films (including those of the Lettrists and Situationists) entirely give up the condition of some kind of motivated interaction between image and sound, however heterogeneous or mysterious their mix. One should note, however the prevalence – especially from students in media-art schools since the 1970s – of elementary collage films which pit a heterogeneous flow of images against a familiar, everyday audio collage: namely, the wholly random soundtrack that can be achieved by simply flipping the dial of a radio.

6. Image-Sound Fusion
A much more exacting practice involves a special synchronisation of image and sound elements – what I will call the realm of image-sound fusion in avant-garde cinema. Of course, we are not speaking here of the banal synchronisation of a recorded voice to an actor’s speaking body, which is the sine qua non of industrial-mainstream-narrative cinema. In the realm of avant-garde cinema that is abstract or largely non-narrative, or where voices are militantly severed from speaking bodies, the ideal of image-sound fusion presents a greater, and ultimately more rewarding, challenge.

Theoretically, it should be possible to posit two forms of the aesthetic economy of such a fusion – image scored to sound, and sound scored to image – not in the loose setting modes described above, but in a moment-to-moment, literally frame-by-frame synchrony. In fact, clear examples of the first economy (images precisely scored to a pre-existing music track or soundscape, a visualisation of sound) are extremely rare – although Warren Burt’s video synthesis process offers one such case, as do some of the abstract animations of Lye (which inspired, in mainstream cinema, the segment of abstract animation fused to the visual spectacle of the optical soundtrack in Disney’s Fantasia [1940], on which Oskar Fischinger rather unhappily collaborated).

A more ambiguous case is offered by the work of Robert Breer, where it is impossible to say, from on-screen evidence alone, whether the artist began from the animated image or the collage of everyday noises, and how he altered one in relation to the other as the process evolved. It is in the very nature of a successful aesthetic fusion that, from the final work, we cannot always distinguish its individual elements and organic processes – if we could, they may not be so fused!

Far more prevalent are explorations into how sound can be scored to the image in a frame-by-frame manner. As in the Breer example, sometimes this fusion can be achieved holistically, without, at the outset, one setting out to score the other. One way to do this is by rigorously defining the separate parameters of image and sound in advance, thus creating a dispositif whereby their moment-to-moment interactions will be closely, even mathematically determined.

Models in this realm range from the work of Kurt Kren in Austria to Hollis Frampton in America; Australian examples deriving from these inspirations include the prolific career of Paul Winkler (Dark [1974], Faint Echoes [1989]); and, arte povera style, Frank Lovece’s Super-8 Te Possino Ammazza (1987), where a mathematically derived image-sound counterpoint is accompanied by a rigorous, choreographic work on movement, gesture and mise en scène.

For many technical and aesthetic reasons, it is difficult to precisely fuse music with image within such a concrete avant-garde practice – this relationship will mostly tend to drift towards a looser setting or counterpoint. There are many mid-way instances where such a fusion begins to be achieved using relatively conventional forms of musical composition, such as in the collaborations in the ‘60s and ‘70s between Stephen Dwoskin and Gavin Bryars – far in advance, aesthetically, of what Peter Greenaway was to later achieve with another British minimalist, Michael Nyman. (It is intriguing that, subsequently in his own career, Dwoskin tends to either become his own composer, or directly treats found sonic samples, as in the slowed-down music of Intoxicated by my Illness [2001].) Carmelo Bene’s work from the late ‘60s to the mid ‘70s with extremely exact editing and mixing of music samples (many of them classical) also offers a rich example of almost total image-sound fusion (amidst seemingly chaotic or random baroque profusion) maintained over feature-length durations; Werner Schroeter, too, reached such heights in films including The Rose King (1986).

However, once again, music can be broken down (as in the Godard case) and manipulated – leading, beyond punctual inserts, to the minute frame-matching of sonic events to visual events in the contemporary Austrian avant-garde works of Peter Tscherkassky, or Sabine Hiebler & Gerhard Ertl – where looping, layering and synthesis of sound are regularly used to create a non-stop fusion effect. Also relevant here is the meticulous reprinting technique that Tschkerkassky sometimes uses on the optical soundtrack of his found footage (as much as on the image track) from frame to frame of such major pieces as Outer Space (1999) – creating a special (and abrasive, in the Lettrist mode) type of musique concrète.

Unsurprisingly, musique concrète, in a general sense, is far more prevalent than conventional music as a form in avant-garde image-sound fusion. An example from absurdist-inspired art, overlapping with the expanded cinema examples, is the work achieved throughout the ‘80s by The Even Orchestra in Sydney, such as The Iced Hopes of Dr Calastein (1981), which derived from spectacular live performances where the performers (including John Evan Hughes, Bruce Currie and Paul Livingston), situated behind a projected-screen, produced a remarkable moment-to-moment Foley track of sounds or noises matched precisely to movements and gestures in the imagery, yet with no conventionally realistic or illustrative relation between them. Various Even Orchestra members later created surrealistic television logos or became offbeat popular comedians (Livingston popped up, weirdly, in Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World [1991] – showing how easily absurdism of various stripes can be co-opted and absorbed by the self-styled edgy/fringe mainstream.

Another, more intransigent Sydney-based crossover of music, performance art and visuals can be found in the remarkable Techno/Dumb/Show (1991) made by video artist John Gillies in collaboration with performance ensemble The Sydney Front. At moments recalling Patrick Bokanowski’s epic L’Ange (1983), Gillies scores a powerfully expressive collage of musicalised noises, full of violent, wind-like sounds and swoops, to gestural tableaux (reminiscent of progressive Russian theatre of the ‘20s) that are obsessively wound back and forth in the video editing.

Let us mention, once again, Thread of Voice – this time in its own material complexity as a film, rather than merely as a document of the group’s performance work. Its rigorous montage of sound and image appear, at once, fused and free. Intriguingly, it approaches, at moments, the limit-case of a film in which images have been scored to sound – where the sound is precisely the thread of voice, the vocal line disengaged as a guide-track.

Every element in Thread of Voice is lyrically or violently re-inscribed elsewhere – in layers of direct filming, re-filming or animation – and metamorphosed: physical gestures begin in semi-darkness, get carried on by another body in another place; words and drawings, forever cancelled, restarted and superimposed, hurl past frame by frame; previously seen images of the performers are retrieved, slowed down, frozen, caught mid-production of an utterance or gesture. At one point, the governing voice-thread allows the sympathetic transformation of this Australian ensemble into another sound-poetry group, the Konkrete Kanticle based in England (whose leader, Bob Cobbing, died late 2002).

Our final example of a triumphant and haunting image-sound fusion is provided by Philip Brophy in his Evaporated Music (2004). In this multi-part project, Brophy strips away the music from a number of well-known, mainstream pop videos (by Billy Joel, Elton John, Céline Dion, etc.), and replaces it with an assortment of ghostly sound effects, again on the Foley principle of synchronisation, edited with razor-sharp precision.

By retaining the image and replacing the soundtrack whole in this way, Brophy re-invents the Situationist practice of détournement – but, instead of re-dubbing dialogue, he plunges us into a sensorial world of groans, flutters, explosions, rattles and hums. Everything ends up looking deathly, sinister, inhuman: Elton John croaks like a horror-movie apparition, a perverse figure indeed as children and adolescents flit around him; Phil Collins emotes unconvincingly in a vacuum, no longer able to imbue the rush of glossy images with any standard meaning or ersatz emotion.

The music has evaporated, and all we are left with are the tawdry remains of pop myths and ideologies. It is a prime example of analysis and critique carried out by avant-garde cinema solely through the material work of image and sound.

NOTES

1. Mark Lorimar, “On the Cantrills’ Negapositive”, Issue, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1983), pp. 9-11. I can find (in 2024) no subsequent work by this author. back

2. For valuable information on many of the filmmakers mentioned in this essay, see Bill Mousoulis’ Melbourne Independent Filmmakers. back

3. Arthur & Corinne Cantrill, “Alternative Cinema: An Interview with Hugh McSpedden”, Cantrills Filmnotes, no. 4 (July 1971), pp. 11-16. back

4. Maj Green and Ewan Cameron, “Film, Painting and Performing – The Collision”, Cantrills Filmnotes, no. 53/54 (September 1987), pp. 16-21. back

5. A superb “DVDBOX” assemblage documenting various aspects of Arf Arf’s works (including Thread of Voice and four earlier films) appeared in a 2013 limited edition from Tochnit Aleph (Berlin). back

6. Maeve Woods, “Sound Aesthetics in Super-8 Film”, Melbourne Super 8 Film Group Newsletter, No. 63 (October 1991), p. 6. back

7. Roberto Aita, “Brothers Quay: In Absentia”, Off Screen (September 2001). back

8. James Clayden, personal correspondence, 24 March 2006. Grandrieux, in Melbourne for the World Cinema Now conference in 2011, provided a corrective to my assumption about the sonic creations by the brilliant sound designer Valérie Deloof (recent credits include The Substance [2024]) and himself: at least for Un lac (2008), no sound was recorded for reuse from the shoot; everything was created from the ground up in post-production. Deloof has partially employed the technique I described (i.e., treating prerecorded sound from the set or location) in films including Proxima (Alice Winocour, 2019); see an enlightening interview with her here in Seventh Row. back

9. See Philip Brophy, “Pseudo Soundtracks: The Myth of Inventive Audiovision in Contemporary Cinema”, in Rainer Kosok & Jonathan Marshall (eds), Sound Scripts, Vol. 2 No. 1 (2009). I am greatly indebted to Philip’s prodigious work on film sound. back

© Adrian Martin April 2006 / May 2010 (+ updates)