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-boun...@jonasmekasfilms.com
<mailto:frameworks-boun...@jonasmekasfilms.com>[mailto:frameworks-boun...@jonasmekasfilms.com
<mailto:frameworks-boun...@jonasmekasfilms.com>]*On Behalf
Of*Ittai Rosenbaum
*Sent:*Wednesday, January 23, 2013 2:37 AM
*To:*frameworks@jonasmekasfilms.com
<mailto:frameworks@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 <tel:%28650%29%20704-6566>
PRÆSENTEM
http://earbits.com/
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