Acoustic shaping

Despite an ever-growing body of scholarship in film and media studies that pays attention to the importance of the acoustic, scholars have, to this day, turned a deaf ear to the integral role of sound in artist films. The dominance of the visual and pictorial codes, I want to argue, ultimately constrains and limits the way in which meaning is produced and received in art films, especially in those that are concerned with sculpture. The discussion of sound in cinema has coalesced around the technological advent of synchronised recording, but it is important to keep in mind that silent films were rarely entirely silent, nor were they conceived to be so: rhythm and musical composition played a crucial role in their overall effect. As early as 1910–1912, the Italian brothers Bruno Corra and Arnaldo Ginna made short, hand-coloured films ( Accordo Cromatico and Canto di Primavera ) that were structured according to music by Mendelssohn and Chopin. In France between 1912 and 1914, Leopold Survage sought to use the new celluloid medium to reconcile movement, rhythm, music and colour. 1 And in the 1920s, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann, Viking Eggeling and Fernand Léger created dynamic abstract visual compositions that were choreographed to a variety of musical forms. 2 For the most part, however, these early experiments were conceptually more closely related to principles of painting than to sculpture.