#comm2314

[3490148]

Aeon Flux - Isthmus Crypticus

I’ve recently been re-watching Aeon Flux with a friend who’s never seen it before. I could probably write a lot more about the whole show but this episode in particular caught my attention for the quality of sound design and the range of effects created by sound (not sound effects) in the story.

"Trevor Goodchild’s latest obsession is an exquisite being which he keeps locked away in a secret chamber. It’s non-of Aeon’s business but…. "

We see the female Seraph-Trev for the first time in Ilbren’s projection, then a photo from the carrier pigeon, both without sound. We first see the male Seraph-Trev at 09:00 when Trevor uses a video screen to check on it; we can hear it wail in discomfort, which infuriates Trevor.

At 09:12 we see the female first-hand, and hear it cry out. On the other side of the wall that separates the two Seraphs, the male hears these screams and becomes distressed. As the male struggles and cries back, loud distorted drones begin playing from speakers in its pen, muting the Seraphs ability to communicate with one another.

At 10:05 Una, who has been enlisted by Aeon to work on an urgent translation, falls asleep while looking at a photo of the male. She dreams of it flying, through red and yellow clouded skies, before a bat-like Aeon swoops in and attacks. The music in this dream sequence is all reversed.

When Aeon finds Una has not completed the translation, she exclaims they will now have to improvise in the field. At 12:52 while Aeon drives them to Trevors complex, Una falls asleep in the passenger seat; out the window behind her we see a red and yellow clouded sky, just like the one in her dream. Each time Una’s head droops in micro-sleeps the energetic music (signifying the tense mood in the car) reverses; just like the music in her dream.

At 15:03 Aeon gives Una an earpiece and microphone so they can communicate while Una translates, and Aeon goes forward on foot: they navigate the maze-like complex together, using sound.

At 17:37 Una uses her mic and earpiece amp to create feedback, deafening Aeon, causing her to fall into the male Seraph’s chamber.

Aeon Flux stories often contain a lot of self-reference, and make use of motifs, which repeat on various scales. There are set-ups, and then payoffs: An idea will be suggested to the audience, often quite abstractly. This could be a piece of dialogue, in the form of a phrase, key word, or story element; a piece of animation, an object, a shape, an angle, or a motion (both character and camera); or in the case of Isthmus Crypticus a sound event, maybe music, or simply the way sound is used in the world of the series.

We see the idea of communication having both positive and negative aspects set up when the seraphs try to communicate with one another but are drowned out by speakers, then complimented later when Una deafens Aeon using their radios. The link isn’t literal, but still an interesting function for sound in the story, as now a device used for communication is being used as a weapon.

The call of the reversed music in Una’s dream also has its answer when she falls asleep in the car with Aeon. Opening us to ideas about mirrored or opposite worlds; things which are familiar, and yet strange. This theme of two halves being separated can also be seen in the large circular chamber that houses the Seraphs, with a single straight wall that connects the two. The dream Una has in the car features a composite Aeon-Narik that flits back and forward between the two, both in appearance and dialogue. Showing how fragile a separation there often is between what is real and unreal, known and unknown ect. Even the episodes title:

isthmus - ˈɪsθməs,ˈɪstməs,ˈɪsməs/

noun: isthmus; plural noun: isthmuses; plural noun: isthmi

1. A narrow strip of land with sea on either side, forming a link between two larger areas of land.

2. Anatomy: a narrow organ, passage, or piece of tissue connecting two larger parts.

Chung is consistently hesitant about providing clear answers to questions about the shows plot and themes; encouraging fans to draw their own conclusions:

"The Seraph-Trevs are not aliens, they are either mystical or genetically engineered by Trevor (take your pick)."

– Peter Chung (from a Q&A with fans)

This embraced plurality creates far more powerful work, by actually creating ‘work’ or problems to be solved, and not answers in the forms of stories. And the use of this setup-payoff method is a great way to get an audience to come along for the ride. If you simply tell someone something you want them to know, they can be resistant to it, for all manner of complex reasons involving layered personal defences. But if you can present them with a question – maybe in the form of a puzzle, half an answer, only a fleeting glimpse of something tantalising – then later return to this idea, you bypass the personal defences of the viewer. You create a bridge between the audiences inner world (via their memory) and the outer world you want them to connect to. Sound, for many complex reasons I can’t get into now, is often the best way through this defensive wall (isthmus).

“On a side note, writing Seraph-trev in the plural reminds me of something in Hebrew grammar called a smikhut, which the construction "Seraph-trev" seems to fit. If you go by the rules of the Hebrew language (which the word seraph is derived from), then the plural would be Seraphei-trev (this sounds more correct to me, as "Seraph-trev" sounds more like Hebrew to me than English). Anyway, I guess that's not really relevant, but it's something that occurred to me and I thought I'd mention it.

And now that I think about it more, perhaps there is relevance to this. If you treat "Seraph-trev" as a smikhut, it means "the seraph of trev", or "Trevor's Seraph" if you want to extend it a little. Makes me wonder if Todd French (who wrote the episode) knew any Hebrew... “

– Matthew Rebholz ([email protected])

[3490148]

Memetic

Extending last week’s journal about French New Wave cinema. The new wave looked at tropes, and then for them - it looked for the construction of the form, to better understand construction and form, and I think contemporary meme culture does the same thing, just far more obscenely.

Of course memes are just a unit of cultural exchange, but I’m talking specifically about humorous videos shared online; particularly those in the MLG (major league gaming) style; specifically because of their willingness to adopt the form of any other recognisable format.

MLG videos began in the form of clip-reels of screen-captured video games, often as demonstrations of impressive performances by players. These are then cut to energetic music and often enhanced with subtitles, zooming and other video effects, including overlayed graphics. Parodies of the over-the-top nature of these game demos began to emerge, which then informed the tone of genuine demos until the two became indistinguishable.

In MLG style videos anything that can be recognised, as a trope becomes a medium, which is its message, and therefor requires no content. In fact anything perceived as having too much content is jumped on hard, shived with irony, and drained. There also seems no distinction made between high or low-brow culture, as everything becomes reduced to a violently dumb base level, seemingly to avoid criticism. The same can be said for any form of morality.

I began collecting a list of these common tropes, but quickly realised the speed at which new material is mined from any form of popular media makes it impossible to say what is or isn’t a trope.

A fairly typical example of the MLG style:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0vzOwHVRI8

In his lecture on “not writing” Stewart Lee talks about the old British model of stand up comedy being one where comedians all told jokes from a collective pool. None were considered writers, because even though some of their material may have been original, most was borrowed. Memes also seem to fit this format of a non-centralised communal pool.

Unchi Neko - LOLs Will Tear Us Apart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvB_hXyiaxk

Obviously inspired by meme culture, and the kind of processes used to create videos in this format, but quite different in a few key ways. While there is definitely a left leaning political theme in much of the chosen footage, there is no clear unifying theme among the clips. Many meme videos will have a premise, or theme, even if it is quite shallow, they then use imported tropes to pull the theme to shreds. Many feedback and self reference to the level where the joke itself is uncertain, and often not funny any more. In this way LOLs Will Tear Us Apart seems to lean further toward the viewer being torn apart, as opposed to the joke.

Neko’s video seems less about the result or impact of meme culture, and more about its inner workings; particularly the way threads can be pulled from almost anything. The video seems to capture the mood of an evening spent ‘surfing the net’; there is a free associative quality, where short loops of videos and sound create a kind of semantic satiation, the original meanings dissolve and new ones emerge. These spontaneous meanings are then used as bridges to the next piece of content.

[3490148]

The Novel Wave

In class we watched Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary, and heard all about French New Wave cinema.

Lewis Bond - Breaking The Rules

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R7R0JHvvgo

The story goes that in the 50s no one took film all that seriously, particularly those produced by Hollywood - they were entertainment - genre films, western, monster, romance ect. Then a small group of French film critics began taking the medium - previously dismissed as a lower form of entertainment - seriously, and began trying to develop a new language to describe it. Succeeding in turning film into an art-form in its own right.

Brophy tried to make a clear distinction between ‘criticism’ and ‘review’ by explaining that a reviewer talks about the film, whereas the critic talks about film.

A great proportion of this group of film critics then went on to become directors themselves including Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy. More than pulp cinema, these directors admired the work of Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, and John Ford, which helped produce the ‘Auteur Theory’ - the idea that a director or film maker is an “author” - like the single creative force behind a book - with their own unique style.

"The 'New Wave' is neither a movement, nor a school, nor a group, it's a quality” - Truffaut (1961)

What made The New Wave possible was not just an understanding of the conventions that made Hollywood what it was, but also a relaxed attitude toward those rules. The groups playfulness became productive. Informed by much new science [relativity] and philosophy [phenomenology] (as always these things are all feedback loops) this playfulness extended into the relation between sound and image, which had until that point been simultaneous, and linear. With this new approach sound became far more relative, and flexible, which begs the question: what other kinds of time relations are possible?

“Photopgraphy is truth, and cinema is truth 24 times a second.” - Godard

The new wave didn’t destroy the old rules, they built on them, you have to understand what’s happening before you can subvert or pervert. [This class is an opportunity to pay close attention to what is happening in any sonic-visual relationship. For example, editing previous to the new wave was used to maintain continuity, a non-intrusive approach; editing was designed to be invisible. But New Wave directors had no problem drawing the audiences attention to the fact they were watching a film, or drawing attention to the edit itself. By demistifying these techniques, the audience is invited inside the film making process, not just the film. The films begin to do what they are.

You don’t need to show everything, but cutting out the excess often increased the pace of the film, our films now are far faster than they used to be. But when this much is cut, something has to take its place: the cut itself took the place of the needless footage, and this event becomes the new context. A kind of gestalt reversal - linked to the time-space I wrote about regarding Ghost In The Shell. The medium was no longer constrained to the whole, an edit, a shot, a camera move could be literary unto themselves. When you aren’t afraid of breaking some kind of illusion, it allows you to do other things.

At the end of his video essay Breaking The Rules, Lewis Bond tries to conclude by taking a key lesson away from the New Wave directors:

“look at what works in your medium and think ‘how can it be done differently?’“

But I think his advice is pretty shallow and dumb. Chances are, things that ‘work’ are invisible. And why would you arbitrarily do something ‘different’? Like the idea of just doing it better - better for who, for what? I think this is where critical theory (a la film criticism) steps in, and one of the great ways to approach this is to talk about what people don’t like, what we think is dumb, or bad. But instead of simply panning or dismissing it, take it deadly serious - which is what the new wave did. It saw the assumptions others made and took them as opportunities, to work with them.

Brophy: most European post war art becomes fractured - the old ways make no sense, so the old ideals crumble, and the work reflects this. American art on the other hand becomes a soothing, coddling respite from difficult ideas.

The bulk of the entry I’ll admit has been a rehash of simply what we went over in class, but what it got me thinking about was the way we are taught to treat different types of culture; namely hierarchically. The new wave took serious, what others didn’t. Or at least saw potential in a new form of media to achieve something others could not. A contemporary example that comes to mind is the meme.

The new wave aimed to embrace the auteurs as the center of the films creation, but memes often aim to displace the idea of a single creator. In fact by the late 60s Barthes and Foucault were looking to unsettle the roots of this tree, and while many a book has been written under pseudonym it isn’t until the rise of the meme that we see a true anonymous author: one unable to be located in a single person.

Part of this is achieved by the suppression (via making unfashionable) of original content, a meme is only a meme when shared, for any meaning to be found it must first have a context - a connection between people that frees either of them from the burden of authorship. However:

While aesthetics do not necessarily contain their user’s politics, they do retain the politics of their origins. The user of an aesthetic either employs its origin sincerely, or ironically, but neither tack depletes the aesthetic of its referent. In fact, the strategic user depends on the aesthetic retaining its referent for ironization or cognitive dissonance to be able to make its meaning. But once irony allows coolness to attach to a Nazi haircut, which clearly retains its referent – even in its name – there is a problem.

http://refigural.com/zip-ties-and-health-goths/

I haven’t spent long this week looking at a particular audio-visual relationship, but next week I hope to pick up this trail by looking at some memes in particular.

[3490148]

Animation, Algorithm, and Space-Time

In week 1 I began by looking at a fan-made video for Lorn’s Sega Sunset, and talking a little about animation - especially late 80s/early 90s Japanese animation. Then paired with the question in this weeks class (regarding last week’s Goodfellas) ‘have you seen anything recently with narration?’ The closest thing I could think of was a lot of film analysis videos, like those from Every Frame A Painting, which I posted in previous journals.

SPACE-time in ghost in the shell

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXTnl1FVFBw

Many of these go beyond simply explaining other films, and become pieces of media in their own right. They have a meta-quality to them, for example, where the aim of the video is to express or highlight good editing, you’d want the short essay to have good editing. I see this as quite different from something like a style guide that explains the correct use of punctuation, but by default uses said punctuation.

Some of these videos also move beyond what you might call journalism. They aren’t simply condensed versions of the films they discuss, they tell their own story, and often challenge the viewer to take more care when making or viewing film/video/television in future. I’ve certainly found myself watching something I’ve seen before, something that wasn’t mentioned explicitly in any of these videos, and approached it differently.

Narration has this odd meta-effect, we see it as external-to or on-top-of the footage. We seem to sit within music, but we don’t sit within dialogue in the same way. I wonder if there are ways to blur these lines.

As mentioned in class, Orson Welles came from radio and brought a lot of the sonic language that implied action, which could not be expressed through sound, into the non-sound world. He took radio plays and extrapolated them out into visuals.

Acting as a way of structuring narrative - how a voice or sound can tell us about what’s happening in a frame. Show, don’t tell. - with voices, this becomes blurred. Sound can behave in a certain way, it occupies space, it can establish hierarchy with dominant volumes, it intensifies, softens, collaborates and combats. Welles’ said that objects should appear on screen according to their significance in a scene. Here we see a young ‘insignificant’ Kane visually dwarfed by the adults in his life.

Back to the earlier mentioned video specifically though, created by Evan Puschak. He describes a particular 3 minute scene in the middle of Ghost In The Shell, where there is no dialogue, and very few shots of any main character.

Puschak uses aspect-to-aspect transitions - an idea Scott McCloud details in his book Understanding Comics - to describe the way each shot is cut together. In American comics we see action-to-action panel transitions - reflecting a goal-orientated culture.

Japanese comics on the other hand abandon the exploration of time, in favor of the exploration of space. “The emphasis is on being there instead of getting there.“

“Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you” - The Puppet Master - Ghost In The Shell

Hard-cuts as they are called in film, drop the viewer into action; the sound and visuals are cut together at the same time. 

Butting actions up against one another creates composite action, an action and a context or environment, might change that action, but butting environments up against one another creates new environments, or complicates a single environment.

To tie this back into previous week’s journals: Lorn’s album Self Confidence Vol. 3 - from which the track Sega Sunset was taken - is a strange format for an album. Lorn emerged from an online forum community of DJs and producers, where some of his early releases were scratch-tapes - looped beats for DJs to practice scratching over.

Self Confidence is a free collection of “unfinished/unreleased/demo/don't remember” tracks with no order (they are all in alphabetical order, the way they might appear on a hard drive). Many of the tracks have obviously been cut from longer jams, they begin and end in much the same way the hard cuts happen in film. J Dilla’s Donuts, and Autechre’s Quaristice opperate in much the same way.

[3490148]

Narration

Off the back of the Lorn fan-videos I looked at last week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxg4C365LbQ

Lorn - Acid Rain (2015) https://imvdb.com/video/lorn/acid-rain

The video is just under three minutes, shot in colour, in slow motion, and almost one consecutive shot, with one cut and one fade toward the end. The scene is set at night with a 70s American style (fashion, car, architecture...) but the dance is more contemporary.

It features a series of dancers in matching cheerleader outfits, who take turns leading the camera from a crashed car, into a diner, through a window out into the car-park where they form a synchronized dance group, before all appearing back in the car, unconscious (or dead).

The dancers oscillate between being affected by their condition (stumbling, leaning on objects for support), and transcending it (dancing energetically); only at the end of the video does the lead become aware of her condition, which dooms her and the others right back to the car.

The camera work is hand-held, but features many stiff movements that suggest takes were stitched together in post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXD0vv-ds8

Flying Lotus feat. Kendrick Lamar - Never Catch Me (2014)

https://imvdb.com/video/flying-lotus/never-catch-me

Never Catch Me, takes place during a funeral, it is set in a church with adjoining funeral parlor. The time period seems wide and flexible, as dark suits and church architecture don’t reveal their age that quickly.

The video opens with a shot of sunlight streaming in through curtains, as the camera pulls back it reveals a coffin on cremation trolley, paired with the sound of reversed cymbals. The camera backs out of the room, tracks sideways down the hall, and faces forward as it enters the main hall of the church.

Through closeup cuts of various details - flowers, stuffed animals, photos, and finally the coffins themselves - it’s revealed this is a funeral for two children. At a break in the songs structure, a choir begins clapping along to the music, and both children rise from their coffins and begin to dance in front of their relatives who presumably cannot see them.

The children then run through the church, out into driveway of the funeral home, where they dance among other children playing jump-rope - the music changes significantly in this scene - from the double-time breaks of the interior to a relaxed half-time shuffle. The pair then dive into the back of a hearse and drive it away down the street.

Never Catch Me, uses a steady cam, with many locked-down static shots, and when it is moving, rolls very smoothly through the space. Acid Rain on the other hand has an awkward but definite hand-held feel to it. From class: Sound is lateral. A parallel. Not a scaffold-like reinforcement of the visuals. Not subservient. A narrator might explain the visuals, but sound can tell another story entirely.Which reminded me of his video - about David Fincher’s use of steady-cam over handheld:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPAloq5MCUA

Every Frame a Painting: David Fincher - And the Other Way is Wrong

So where we lack voice-over narration, the camera takes its place. The camera tells the story, not the music. In this sense Never Catch Me is shot from an almost god-like perspective, events were ‘doomed to happen’. It bridges the worlds of the afterlife, and the earthly. The dancers in the video are almost ghosts, behaving the way their mourners would like to remember them.

Acid Rain on the other hand plunges the viewer into the world, and even though the dancers are also dead (gore aside) their joyful movements feel far more unsettling. The ghosts in this video are the ideals of the culture, the ghosts are the cars, the uniforms, the diner. The bodies are simply carriers, waste.

[3490148]

Lorn - Sega Sunset

In class we discussed using a highly literal approach to reading sound in film as a way of getting started - because hopefully it bypasses a lot of assumptions about what the sound is supposed to do.

How was it made? vs What does it function to do?

There’s a counter-intuitive quality here though, where the literal reading of something can lead directly to its metaphorical power (Blood Simple):

“What does the synth sound like?”

“Voices”

“So it functions like a chorus?”

There was also a note about the sound design in a film having the ability to consume the perspective of the viewer. “I am the sound I hear”

Because we can not shut our ears; our filter for sound is in our minds. Most of what we hear is filtered out, and when we are concious of it, it got there by crossing a bridge - not from the outside world into our ears (like sight to our eyes) - by by crossing from one part of our minds into another.

“Non-diegetic sound is godlike”

Sound has the power to act in an otherworldly way; namely that internal world, that can change drastically from one moment to the next while everything outside the mind stays still.

In the last week I was in the mood for Lorn’s Self Confidence Vol. 3, and shared this clip with a friend as a way of introducing her to the artist. Self Confidence is a series of mixtapes or collections of drafts/snippets, but this track Sega Sunset stands out brilliantly against the already impressive backdrop.

I really didn’t know anything about the guy (other than his music) before sitting down to write this. But I might skip that for now and see what I can pull from the video first.

The track is very simple structurally; one main chord progression with slight inflections and support from a range of synths and drum machines.

Beginning with a straight pulsing ‘electric piano’ chord, with a medium speed panning tremolo. Next comes a typical Lorn-y grunting mid-heavy bass synth flanked by smoother, more resonant strings, and higher softer flutes. Then pulsing synthesized drums, that trace the tempo without adding a beat as such. Very softly mixed comes a hummed vocal melody, and finally another high pitched but somewhat harsher flute.

The piece is slow, maybe 70bpm, and develops in quite a linear way with each element building on the last, and some deconstruction (but no deviation) toward the end. The sounds and melodies feel both sad and epic. The central theme or chord progression has an escalating rhythm with each note coming quicker than the last, but the melody descends until the final beats where its capped by a strained upward inflection that drops back to the 1.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mauV2NdCs60

The clip is a fan-made video, re-cut to the music. The original footage is an excerpt from Running Man, part of Neo Tokyo a 1987 collection of three films by famous anime directors, this one by Yoshiaki Kawajiri of Ninja Scroll fame.

The opening shots are fades from and to black of instrument panels inside a moving vehicle. Lights whiz by the windows to suggest speed, and the readings of dials in the cab shake with instability. These shots are set to the stable pulsing electric piano.

As the first note of the core bass sounds, the fade from black reveals a human drivers hands. The fades and cuts get shorter to match the increasing pace of the chord changes, landing at their peak on a closeup of the drivers face, with twitching eyelids that suggest a physical struggle to maintain their otherwise still composure.

The next sound accompanies a breakaway from the vehicle establishing a context of racetrack, other cars and surrounding buildings. All shots in the short are stable (you might say tripod in live-action) with slow pans, accompanied by much faster animated details.

We return to the driver briefly, but from outside his cab, with more complex lighting and movement across the windshield. An onlooker looses grip on his cigarette which falls, in slow motion, to the ground. This re-frames the earlier shots as perhaps being in slow motion too, which would give the entire scene a more intense feel.

The driver looks manic as glass around the track begins to shatter and fall in slow motion - this then connects us with a flashback to glass falling around the driver while he sits still and contorted - then, still in the flashback objects around him begin to levitate; ‘falling’ in the opposite direction.

We then sharply cut back to the race, where health monitors alarm, and the driver is warned: “ABSTENTION” flashing in red across the screen in his cab as his pupils disappear and the twitching of his eyelids ripples across the rest of his face. Then quick cuts between an a flashback of an earlier break-down/through and the drivers current condition.

The visual language then collapses somewhat confusing flesh with machine, as blood runs from the drivers nose and mouth, and fluids burst free from the machinery he’s within. His helmet gives way, and the force inside him bursts free spilling out as glowing tendrils, paired with exterior shots of the car experiencing something similar.

The last shot the longest, of the driver in-cab, with windshield exploded, his jaw agape and completely absorbed by whatever force he possesses, or possesses him. As fire surrounds the car the image blurs and ripples with the distortion of heat.

I think this works far better than the original short film. Perhaps it’s because I really love the music, and saw this first but found when I watched the original it was far too slow, and included a lot of backstory that I felt adds nothing to the power of the clips chosen for this video.

The force of the images is only reinforced here by music. As opposed to the dialogue of the original. reminding me of the in class discussion about narration perfectly demonstrated by Tony Zhou’s below @ 04:07

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs

The score, and even story in the original Running Man is far more forgettable than Lorn’s Sega Sunset. And like Beyonce’s dancing, or the raw energy of death metal, when the point isn’t the script, when the point is the animation, it makes far more sense to use animated music. Music that works the same way the animation does, with stability, pace, detail and mood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMQiMosF1B0

I’ll admit, Lorn’s music lends itself so easily to this re-mix, proven in many more cases by MetaCitizen (responsible for Running Man/Sega Sunset as well as others) but also plenty of other fans. But this isn’t just the music, it’s most certainly something about animation that allows the substitution of sound. What the video reminded me of most was early VHS advertisements for other Manga films:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovJXadUHQyw

Sepultura’s Refuse Resist works perfectly for the energy, pace, and violence of fast hand-drawn clips. The way image can be re-cut to music, the short, animation, and the internet-video are all things I’d like to come back to in later entries.