Towards an Asynchronous Cinema

One of the things that happened in 2016 was I finally got to complete my PhD. I say finally as I had been umming and ahhing over doing one for some years; initially wanting to do a practice based PhD, but never quite finding the right supervisor or setting. A chance conversation with Michael Szpakowski at a screening of Kerry Baldry's One minute programme at Furtherfield led to Westminster University where Michael was completing a PhD by publication. The publications being not texts in the traditional sense, but videos made in the last ten years. This seemed an ideal pathway and I signed up as well.

For a PhD by publication, alongside the work, one writes a paper of anywhere between 12 and 60,000 words.  Reflecting on one's own practice turned out to be tricky, talking about one's work in the third person as if one were reviewing it is best avoided, and locating the videos in a critical context informed by other artists' moving image pieces can both exaggerate their influence and/or appear as if one is trying to insert oneself into the canon. For example a strong parallel with my own use of sound  is John Smith's The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) and this is cited at numerous points in the thesis. However it would be very hard to make any work if one was constantly referring back to some seminal piece, rather a number of influences and ideas tend to circulate, often in some unspoken way in one's brain before morphing into a new idea/piece. So the thesis in part makes explicit what was at the time implicit or internalised.    

Theoretically I found myself being drawn back to the Eisenstein (et al) Statement on Sound (1928) and the dangers of adhesion between sound and image as potential illusionist mutual reinforcement. It was not Eisenstein however, but one of the other signatories to the Statement, Pudovkin and his nuanced use of asynchronism in a document a year later which proved more useful. For Pudovkin asynchronism implies a careful jaxtaposition of soudn and image not wilful non-synchronisation. Key to this is that the asynchronous use of sound is punctuated with moments of adhesion, creating a push-pull dynamic that questions causality between the visual and the auditory and leads to dialectic. 

In the coming year I shall try and unpack and extend some of the ideas in the thesis, for now here is a link to the paper.