Category: Exploration

Pushing Boundaries: Entering Other Worlds – The world of Audio Documentary

Alaine Thompson on

For this weeks exploration I decided to explore the audio documentary. Since Kyla Brettle showed us some examples of her work in our lectorial this week, I found it very interesting how much more powerful it was to just listen to the content and imagine the situation, rather than both see and hear it simultaneously. I saw the power of audio, as it allows the audience to really, truly create the links in their head, they aren’t as guided by the director and are more free to make up their own mind.

The first audio documentary was simply anthropological observations ad historical recordings of daily life and civilisations, much like the “first films shot by Edison and the Lumière brothers — no edits or narration or stories.” (Carrier, 2014) The first incident of this was in 1890, when “an anthropologist named Jesse Walter Fewkes used a phonograph to record the songs and speech of the Passamaquoddy Indians of eastern Maine. For many decades this was the extent of audio documentary — recording oral history and music.” (Carrier, 2014)

Some examples from 1890 (Carrier, 2014):

Snake Dance:

Mr. Phonograph:

Kyla Brettle is a prolific producer of audio documentaries, such as ‘Trauma’ which, “In a kaleidoscopic style shifting between observational and experiential forms of documentary, Mark Fitzgerald, the Director of Emergency Services takes us into the heart of his department – a place where dramatic, life-changing events occur with relentless regularity against a background of routine order. As staff and patients share their experiences of either unexpectedly arriving at the hospital or coming home from it every day, documentary maker Kyla Brettle seeks to discover what place the big questions about life, society and human nature have in an environment that by definition strives to maintain the mechanics of life from one moment to the next.” (ABC, 2013)

“Why radio? Why documentary? Answer: No other medium can provide me with more freedom of creation and investigation. It meets my urgent interest in reality and the desire for a ‘musical’ expression. The material (der Werkstoff) is sound. And sound always surrounds us. And: I’m not so much interested in the description of stable situations, but in processes. Our medium is not space, but time; our stories are not glued to the ground, but have motion, life … That’s why!” – Helmut Kopetzky, German author, Self-portrait

 – Carrier, Scott. ” A Brief History of Documentary Forms. 6. NPR & Radio Docs.” Apr. 3rd 2014. Available at: http://transom.org/2014/brief-history-of-documentary-forms/
 – ABC. “Trauma.” Oct. 20th 2013. Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/sundayfeature/trauma/5032004

John Cage: The Art of Noticing

Alaine Thompson on

John Cage was born in late 1912 and died on August 12th, 1992. And yet, his mark still remains on music and art history. Cage challenged the very idea of what constitutes music, playing amplified cacti and plant materials with a feather:

‘Waterwalk’, in which Cage uses a variety of things (mostly containing water and surrounding a piano):

John Cage’s music challenges the very notion of what music is. Just as we as media practitioners must find the malleability within our art form, Cage constantly tests the boundaries of what music is by distilling it down to its purest and most basic forms and then experimenting. By doing this he creates his own ideas about sound and does not rely on the limitations already put in place by musicians before him.

In Cage’s 4’33”, Cage performs, quite literally silence, but as you will notice, silence does not exist, as when a room has no external sounds, we become acutely aware of all the other sounds constantly surrounding us, such as our heartbeats, breathing, coughs, chair squeaks, etc. Any sounds that we’d normally place in the background come forward. I could place a video example here, there are plenty of them on YouTube, examples of people performing nothing, or you could just find a silent spot and sit and listen to the ‘silence’ for 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

The question is though, is this music? Cage is quoted as saying that, “everything we do is music.”, so every sound, every little exclamation or breath we take is music. We just don’t hear it very often because it’s cluttered by all the other sounds we create and subject ourselves to for entertainment. Cage was very interested by the concept, or sounds which silence produced:

John Cage, even though he may be a practitioner of sound, ‘silence’ and music, is vital to study when undertaking any arts related course, because looking at Cage’s work forces you to look differently at a medium you may have unknowingly perceived as being within a strict, stationary box. Whereas Cage’s work, and many other experimentalists like him prove, that there is no limit to what can be achieved with a medium.

Media is Re-Learning: Experimental Film

Alaine Thompson on

To me, the summation of this first week’s topic is the way in which the many mediums we utilise to express oursleves are constsntly challenged reworked and experimented with, to create entirely new artworks we never thought to exist before. Experimental film is one such explorative art that challenges the very meaning of media every day and causes us to re-learn and challenge what we know about media.

Stan Brakhage is one such experementalist, creating pieces of art described as music without sound, created only through the moving image. He does this by painting directly onto film stock. The funnt thing about this technique, besides how painstaking it is to create even a minute with 24 frames a second to paint, but beneath the paint there is always an underlying image, which at times Brakhage allows to come momentarily to the surface. This technique allows Brakhage to combine two very different techniques for incredible effect in ‘the Dante Quartet’:

Another form of experimental film is one which utilises found footage. ‘Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy’, is a short experimental film by Martin Arnold and it uses only footage from Andy Hardy films. Arnold takes apart each film to find footage which, when slowed down or quickened, reversed or played forward, creates an entirely different meaning. One not necessarily PG. Through ‘remixing’ the footage, Arnold creates an entirely different plot, one that creates quite the oedipal complex:

One of the earliest forms of experimental cinema came out of Dadaism and post-Cubism in the 1920’s (Tohline, 2013). This form of experimental cinema often had an anti-establishment bend to it, and this film follows that genre through its contratsing of the human form and static, mechanical objects, emphasisng the now mechanical nature of humanity (as is evident through the title). “Ballet mécanique constitutes one of the most famous and most successful examples surviving this brief-lived but highly innovative, highly influential period of experimental production.” (Small, 2015):

As you can see through the examples above, experimental films reshape our understanding of exactly what ‘media’ is, and reminds us that there really are no limitations within it, only those we put on oursleves.

 

– Small, Edward S. “Le Ballet Mecanique.”

– Tohline, Max. “On Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger, 1924).“