Triangle is in post & I’ve been thinking about sound & score –
I started reading Audio-Vision, a book about sound on screen by French theorist Michel Chion. The following excerpt is from Walter Murch‘s foreword:
The danger of present-day cinema is that it can crush its subjects by its very ability to represent them; it doesn’t possess the built-in escape valves of ambiguity that painting, music, literature, radio drama, and black-and-white silent film automatically have simply by virtue of their sensory incompleteness — an incompleteness that engages the imagination of the viewer as compensation for what is only evoked by the artist. By comparison, film seems to be “all there” (it isn’t, but it seems to be), and thus the responsibility of filmmakers is to find ways within that completeness to refrain from achieving it. To that end, the metaphoric use of sound is one of the most fruitful, flexible, and inexpensive means: by choosing carefully what to eliminate, and then reassociating different sounds that seem at first hearing to be somewhat at odds with the accompanying image, the filmmaker can open up a perceptual vacuum into which the mind of the audience must inevitably rush.
The artist evokes, creating space for the viewer to engage his/her imagination. It’s the creation of that in-between space supported by the actual work, that facilitates the activation of the viewer’s imagination. This relates to my earlier post about magic realism & film in that a painting does have this ambiguity built into its 2D, static form. But film is so totally different & powerful. Murch refers to sound as vision’s shadow, and by separating object & shadow & subsequently reassociating new sound with vision, one can create both subtle & powerful expressions for the viewer to experience.
Art / Poetry =
evoking –> imagination, experience –> feeling –> thinking –> meaning