An audio-visual Gallivant: Psychogeographical soundscapes in the films of Andrew Ktting

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aimee Mollaghan

Andrew Ktting is one of the most innovative film-makers working in Britain today, using his distinctive Punk multimedia aesthetic to circumvent not only the conventions of narrative cinema, but also the conventions of experimental film and fine art. One of Ktting's enduring concerns is the psychogeographical use of landscape and soundscape as a catalyst for arresting and inventive investigations into memory and identity. Composer R. Murray Schafer uses the word soundscape to identify sound that describes an environment, actual or abstract, but always a sound relevant to a place (Schafer 1994). The sounds of our environment have a powerful effect on our imaginations and memories and Ktting exploits this effect across his body of work. The use of the disembodied voice is another marked feature of Ktting's films, creating both implied narratives and the evocation of memory. Ktting's bodiless voices have a schizophonic quality to them. Kotting rips sounds and voices from their sources and imbues them with an independent existence that is at liberty to emanate from anywhere in the landscape. This article investigates Ktting's idiosyncratic creation of soundscapes as a filmic reproduction of the human psyche, exploring memory, identity and community through an interweaving of voice, music and environmental sound.

Author(s):  
Luka Bešlagić

This paper analyses the experimental film Sonne halt! by Ferry Radax, an Austrian filmmaker renowned for his unconventional approach to cinematic practice. Filmed and edited between the end of the 1950s and early 1960s, the film at first may appear to be a belated homage to the previous European experiments in avant-garde cinema, already carried out a few decades earlier. However, since there have been no great ‘historical avant-garde’ movements in Vienna in the period between the two world wars – according to the novel argument made by Klaus Kastberger – it was already the middle of the 20th century when the ‘original’ avant-garde strategies were finally acknowledged in Austria, and simultaneously appropriated by the ‘neo-avant-garde’. In this peculiar historico-cultural context Sonne halt!, in its fragmentary non-narrative structure which resembles Dadaist or Surrealist playfulness and openness, innovatively and radically interweaved two disparate film registers: moving image and spoken language. Various sentences arbitrarily enounced throughout the film – which have their origin in Konrad Bayer’s unfinished experimental, pseudo-autobiographical, montage novel der sechste sinn – do not constitute dialogues or narration of a traditional movie script but rather a random collection of fictional and philosophical statements. At certain moments there is a lack of rapport between moving image and speech – an experimental attempt by Ferry Radax to challenge one of the most common principles of sound and narrative cinema. By deconstructing Sonne halt! to its linguistic and cinematic aspects, this article particularly focuses on the role of verbal commentaries within the film. Article received: December 28, 2017; Article accepted: January 10, 2018; Published online: April 15, 2018; Original scholarly paper How to cite this article: Bešlagić, Luka. "Interweaving Realities: Spoken Language and Moving Images in the Sonne halt!, Experimental Film by Ferry Radax." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): . doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.228


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-73
Author(s):  
Eliza Preston

This article explores what the work of Sigmund Freud has to offer those searching for a more spiritual and philosophical exploration of the human experience. At the early stages of my psychotherapy training, I shared with many peers an aversion to Freud’s work, driven by a perception of a mechanistic, clinical approach to the human psyche and of a persistent psychosexual focus. This article traces my own attempt to grapple with his work and to push through this resistance. Bettelheim’s (1991) treatise that Freud was searching for man’s soul provides a more sympathetic lens through which to explore Freud’s writing, one which enabled me to discover a rich depth which had not previously been obscured. This article is an account of my journey to a new appreciation of Freud’s work. It identifies a number of challenges to Bettelheim’s argument, whilst also indicating how his revised translation allowed a new understanding of the relevance of Freud’s work to the modern reader. This account may be of interest to those exploring classical psychotherapeutic literature as well as those guiding them through that process.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.


1952 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-387
Author(s):  
Robert Bruce Rogers
Keyword(s):  

CFA Magazine ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-32
Author(s):  
Ed McCarthy
Keyword(s):  

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