[Frameworks] Singularity and intentional incoherence

[Tom Whiteside]

This is interesting - thanks for asking a fresh question. As a "film person" who started out in music decades ago, I have always envied and admired the breadth and depth of musicology. Film studies is such a young field - we are centuries behind.

 Filmmaker Hollis Frampton made a film titled "Hapax Legomena" which immediately comes to mind.

And although Mel Brooks doesn't make this list too often, he's going to hit it twice right away. A good example of your singular event would be in his Western film "Blazing Saddles," the cowboys are galloping across the plains and the movie music is playing on the soundtrack, sounds like Count Basie and His Orchestra - well my goodness, it IS Count  Basie and His Orchestra and the cowboys just rode right past them, out there on the plains. It's a simple thing, played for laughs - the previously unseen soundtrack orchestra revealed - but it is quite a singular moment.  And for many people it probably changed, at least a little bit, the way they think about "movie music."

There is the moment in Jem Cohen's "Lost Book Found" when the conventional "unseen narrator" voice slowly fades out and is replaced by a different, unexpected voice, delivering a more cryptic message. It is a pivotal moment in that film. Similarly, in Raul Ruiz's "Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting" a guy is sitting in a chair talking in rather flat tones, it becomes increasingly boring, he slows down.... and he falls asleep. On camera, the narration just goes to sleep. I only saw that film once and am probably not remembering this correctly, but I do remember the singularity of my experience sitting there, listening to this guy, trying to make sense of it, getting a bit bored, then watching him nod off. That woke me up!

Tom                Durham Cinematheque

From: frameworks-bounces at jonasmekasfilms.com [mailto:frameworks-bounces at jonasmekasfilms.com] On Behalf Of Ittai Rosenbaum
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 2:37 AM
To: frameworks at jonasmekasfilms.com
Subject: [Frameworks] Singularity and intentional incoherence

Hi
My name is Ittai Rosenbaum, I am a doctoral student at the music composition department at UCSC and in the process of defining my Qualification Exams topics. I wondered if anyone could perhaps have interesting knowledge or insights about a subject in film theory that might parallel one of my topics.

I am interested in singular events in composition: events that occur only once, contrasted and incoherent to the main musical language of the work, yet deliberately conceived and intentionally inserted in the composition, contributing, by way of distraction and surprise, to the conception of the piece.

Coherence seems to constitute a compulsory element in composition, and even incoherence (surprise, collage etc.) as it happens in the music of, say, Charles Ives, George Crumb or John Zorn, becomes coherent and even homogenous once it recurs. I suspect that singular, incoherent events may have a genuine effect, different than that.

I am interested in parallel or similar phenomena in film, as my own compositions are more than often related to the visual, verbal, social and other elements usually inherent in film.
Far from an expert in films, I do recall several instances where I felt I have viewed such singular events in film: the awakening in Chris Marker's La jetée - a single moment of two seconds of movement in a film made entirely of stills, some moments that I can't recall now in Fellini's films (although usually there is a certain "homogeneity of singularity" in the ones I saw), and a comic one, in Mel Brooks's Silent Movie, when the famous pantomime Marcel Marceau utters the only single word in the film: "no!"

I would be very interested to know if this is something that has been written about and generally what your experience and opinion is.

thank you


--
Ittai Rosenbaum
www.ittairosenbaum.com<http://www.ittairosenbaum.com>

(650) 704-6566

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