French composer Michel Chion refers to the “audiovisual contract” as a ‘basic paradigm for the relationship between sounds and moving images’. We can understand that sound can ‘enrich a given image’ through properties that give ‘added value’. However, he appears in disbelief about ideas that would then deem sound as secondary or unnecessary.

In this clip from the film Basquiat (1996), Basquiat (Jeffrey Wright) and his friend Benny (Benicio del Toro) argue about whether to include the music or to keep it simply visual. Which invites discussion about how well these two elements can collaborate to convey the artist’s vision or whether it becomes an opportunity cost for the message it delivers.

In Shaviro’s article he claims that new meanings are created and built on the existing piece enabling a ‘sense of directional temporality and autonomy to otherwise fragmented images’. This interestingly endorses Del Toro’s idea that the images feel bare without the sound and that the contract evolves the work onto a new plane of understanding, enabling new ways of perceiving it as post-cinema. Fascination occurs when observing these two distinct elements in a dialectical sense which implies they possess existing roles but continue to subvert and vary as they both conflict and supplement one another.

Edouard Salier’s 2010 music video for “Splitting the Atom” by Massive Attack is a dystopian dive into a lost and dark reggae-influence world, that is just out of tune and not quite danceable yet almost immediately trance-able. The sustained steady pulse that lines the chaotic melancholy simply exists in a world that lives endlessly directionless. Shaviro argues it’s ‘endurance in the face of pain… as if this were the best that we could hope for.’ The video does not act as an extension of the sound but provides a similarly bleak existence without purpose, a sort of suspension in doomsday with no intent to do anything but wallow. This shared feeling is sustained by the combined yet separated lack of motion and narrative from both the music and the video; an acceptance and indifference to disaster.

The continuity of the long ‘crane shot’ take and the purposelessness throughout the entire song flourish into a dystopian dialogue that can be both examined together and individually, both establishing a message without having to explicitly say the same thing. This highlights the capability of an ‘audiovisual contract’ which can constantly generate new meanings from the interaction of both elements.

References:

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Print.

´Steven Shaviro, (2017), ‘Glitch Aesthetics’, Digital Music Video.

https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/3-4-shaviro/

Zayn Rajan 33777996