The Musical Form in Avant Garde Film & Video
The history of experimental filmmaking is rich with explorations into the relationships between cinematic and musical experiences. Cinema and music each unfold over time, as transitory experiences. Sharing this time-based structure relates them on a fundamental level and opens opportunities to investigate relationships between the two disciplines beyond which either the sound or the image serves to simply assist, heighten or illustrate the other, (as with the movie soundtrack or music video).
In the art world interest in synesthesia began in the late nineteenth century and reached a peak in the 1920s. Synesthesia is the phenomenon in which the stimulation of one of the senses triggers a different sense. For example, an individual sees a color when s/he hears a specific sound. It is physiological concurrence of science and aesthetics that fascinated artists such as the early 20th century Russian abstract painter, Wassily Kandinsky, and Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. (For more information and links about synesthesia see: http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/spec.projects/synesthesiabib.html).
In this show, the term synesthesia is used metaphorically to describe films that are based on a musical structure, or intended to create a musical experience with images - much the way filmmakers in the 1920s might have considered it. The term is used to contextualize recent work historically, to connect contemporary work with the work of filmmakers in the 1920s and 1930s, such as Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger.
All screenings are free and open to the public and handicapped accessible.
Sponsored by the Fine Arts Center Galleries; The Honors Program and Visiting Scholars Committee;
Film Studies; the Department of Art; the Department of Music.
For more information contact Sheri Wills at sheri_wills@uri.edu, 401.874.4823
background image by Ron Hutt