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Abstract
Throughout the history of the avant-garde, sound has been a crucial element of cinematic investigation, yet analyses of sound have been virtually absent from historical and theoretical texts on avant-garde film. This dissertation aims to address this critical absence by exploring the role of sound in the history of avant-garde cinema, in particular the use of 16mm optical audio in the structural films of Paul Sharits, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Robert Russett, Richard Lerman, and Barry Spinello. Focusing on a group of films made between 1966–1978 that explicitly investigate the visual and aural possibilities of the optical sound format, this project uses contemporaneous writings on sound to examine these films and to re-think the relationship of avant-garde cinema to avant-garde music.
Structural cinema emphasized "film as material," yet critical writing on the movement has tended to focus almost exclusively on the filmmakers' investigations of optics and the visual components of the cinematic apparatus. This study locates Fitzgibbon, Russett, Sharits, Lerman, and Spinello within the structural film tradition, and carefully examines their treatments of both the visual and sonic aspects of the material of film. These filmmakers thought of sounds and images as inextricably linked and interdependent aspects of the physical material of cinema. The works that I consider in this dissertation make the claim that sound was something that drove, focused, scored, and mapped out the shape of the films that were being made during this period of time.
I propose that these filmmakers were exploring the experience of the cinematic and drawing out unusual and unexpected connections between the apparatus and the corporeal body. Linking the technology of projection to human physiology, Sharits, Fitzgibbon, Russett, Lerman and Spinello's films are asking us to "listen in" to the sounds of the material of film, the machinery of projection, and the viewing body.
