MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Brian C. Short
SOUND & MOTION
I want to concentrate on the close relation between music and the moving image. This of course is nothing new, but is an intrinsic relationship within cinema, and has been since the earliest days of silent films projected to musical accompaniment. But there are moments when image and sound speak to one another quite directly, beyond the emotional or thematic cues of a musical soundtrack in support of storytelling, or the beats an editor may cut against in a commercial work to match its rhythm or compress a “message” into 30 seconds exactly. There are moments when not only does the music enhance the image, but the reverse also happens, when image supplements music, and the two become a singular, dynamic whole very much like dance. Perhaps it is because I worked for a few years in the particular rigors of advertising post production, or because I grew up in the era of the music video as media wallpaper, but it is within the condensed interplay of music-to-image that I now find my work naturally gravitates, and that I would like to consider here. Because my own work tends to fall within or very near the framework of a music video, I want to feature a number of similar pieces, most of which are intended as music videos, though of a sort that I think transcends their function with a particular experimentalist edge.
This week’s post is a short music video for Ben Frost’s album AURORA, on the Icelandic label Bedroom Community, which Frost co-founded with label-mates Valgeir Sigurðsson and Nico Muhly. The film is one of a series of three by Trevor Tweeten and Richard Mosse, and it speaks, albeit in a slightly elliptical way, to the visceral impact of Frost’s music, which is itself both abstract and direct.
https://youtu.be/ISTL9FPkUVI?list=RD-Gig7e5lwOE