Hello,
Consider the brief close-up appearance of the cockatoo around the last
third of Citizen Kane. Cut to bird, loud bird shriek on soundtrack, then
back to the story. Welles' purpose in this odd cutaway was to wake up the
audience, exactly as Tom Whiteside describes with his experience. ("It has
a sort of purpose, but no meaning" - reference on p. 72 of This Is Orson
Welles.) I suspect other singularities, at least in the novel use of them
by Hollywood, have a similar purpose/effect.
D. A. Miller has written interestingly on Hitchcock's cameos in a way that
could be connected to their "singularity" within each film; but then again,
the cameos as a whole represent a coherence in that they occur throughout
Hitchcock's career.
Andy Ditzler
On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 2:37 AM, Ittai Rosenbaum <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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
>
> (650) 704-6566
>
> PRÆSENTEM
>
> http://earbits.com/
>
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