Carol Vernallis Research Articles

Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry, and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, and Lisa Perrott, eds. (2019)

Review of: Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry, and New Audiovisual Aesthetics, Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, and Lisa Perrott, eds. (2019) New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 528 pp., ISBN: 9781501341007 (pbk), $42.95, ISBN: 9781501339271 (hbk), $160.00, ISBN: 9781501339264 (epub/mobi), $38.65, ISBN: 9781501339288 (pdf), $38.65

Co jest grane? O relacjach muzyki i ruchomego obrazu w wideoklipach muzycznych

The article discusses the relations between sound and moving image in music videos. The author, referring to the concepts of researchers such as Jurij Łotman, Carol Vernallis, Urszula Jarecka, Mirosław Przylipiak, and others, draws attention to the special type of synthesis which occurs between sound and vision in music videos. Supporting his considerations with the analysis of representative video clips, the author proves that the mutual relation of sound and image is an important element of the narration present in music videos. Sound (in the form of a song) is the core element of music videos, but their polymedia nature allows to emphasize correlation and synthesis of individual layers comprising its structure. The higher-order communication quality created in this way results from the integration of semantically different-code elements, which can be seen in the analytical part.

The Frame and The Swerve: Music Video's Relationship to Dance

THE FRAME AND THE SWERVE: MUSIC VIDEO’S RELATIONSHIP TO DANCE BRAD OSBORN I. FRAME AND SWERVE RAWING FROM THINKERS as diverse as Parmenides, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, and Hegel, John Rahn draws a distinction between two modes of framing the world: Being and Becoming. Being is “the tendency to identify an unchanging essence of things and to sort out the cosmos in terms of such essences,”1 while a philosophy of Becoming focuses on “existence rather than essence; change, flux, fire, plasma. . . .”2 For Rahn, this Being/Becoming binary maps neatly onto Lucretius’s model of the universe: a frame, in which each unchanging essence falls in neat parallel lines as a stream of atoms, represents the Being strand. What makes the universe interesting for Lucretius—what makes change occur or transforms Being into Becoming—is its propensity for swerve, for one stream of falling atoms to interact spontaneously with another stream. The Being of Lucretius’s neat parallel atomic movements represents “the frame of structural (or divine) order” whereas Becoming is engendered by the swerve of “free and artistic will.”3 D 212 Perspectives of New Music Rahn uses this binary opposition to describe some innovative ways that music theorists have used mathematics to talk about music. Theorists of Being focus on “nailing down simple invariant structures such as scales, chords, and pitch class sets, making taxonomies, natural histories,”4 while theorists of Becoming (often composer-theorists) focus on “what might be useful theory for their compositional activity.”5 In true Rahnian fashion, he sets up this binary opposition only to problematize the binary itself: “Turbulence is not free will, laminar flow is not determinism or slavery or totalitarianism (or even bad art).”6 I will use this opposition between Being/frame and Becoming/ swerve (and its eventual destruction) to model what I see as two different ways in which music videos relate to the dance(r)s they depict. The first I’ll call choreographed. In choreographed videos, several dancers perform (nearly) identical dances, each body falling in parallel lines within a Lucretian frame. The sounding music, usually played in real time during the video’s filming session, could also be described as one of these parallel lines. As Rahn says of Being, “entities do not have to influence each other on the fly and nothing really changes.”7 But if we look closely, we can observe slight swerves in which the spontaneous actions cued by that sounding music influence one or more dancers’ bodies to fall out of sync, to fall with free will. Contrast the choreographed dance with the improvised. In this type of music video, several bodies (often playing instruments) interact spontaneously with the sounding music as they trace the audible lines of their recorded artifact. The improvised video is full of flux and swerve. Each dancer is spontaneously influenced not only by the dynamics of the sounding music, but also the other dancers’ spontaneous bodily interpretations. Like Becoming, improvised dancing constitutes a complex system of “interacting agents which evolves irreversibly and almost capriciously to a complex organization of its own.”8 Chaos is held together only by the framing music; the musicians must convincingly approximate the bodily movements associated with the heard instrumental music. The music and the dancers are therefore entangled, interweaving a series of horizontal threads. II. A TALE OF TWO VIDEOS Like some music theorists, multimedia scholars like typologies.9 Music videos have been classified into various types by a number of scholars. Martina Elicker offers a four-part typology: 1) Videos that illustrate the lyrics; 2) Videos that add new meanings that amplify, but do not The Frame and The Swerve: Music Video’s Relationship to Dance 213 contradict the lyrics; 3) Videos that have no apparent relationship with the lyrics and/or contradict them; and 4) Performance video.10 Relative degrees of narrative structure underpin the first three types, proceeding from a video’s tightest possible relationship with the lyrics to the loosest. Elicker, Carol Vernallis, and others have developed sophisticated tools and theories to address the difference between the first three types of video.11 However, the fourth type, the performance video, remains under-theorized. Scholars have often cast...

Authenticity, artifice, ideology: Heavy metal video and MTV’s ‘Second Launch’, 1983–1985

Abstract Music video scholars have identified a ‘second launch’ of MTV during 1983–1985, a period when, as Andrew Goodwin writes, ‘MTV programmed heavy metal with a vengeance’. My article expands on the research of Goodwin, Lisa Lewis, Carol Vernallis and others in exploring the question of why metal emerged during this particular MTV era in the wake of British-based new pop, which had dominated the ‘first launch’ of MTV since August 1981. Central to my research is a more nuanced analysis of the metal subgenres that dominated programming between 1983 and 1985 – videos that are quite distinct both from the non-realist British new pop of bands such as ABC, Ultravox and Duran Duran and from the ‘hair metal’ that proliferated in the late 1980s.

The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics ed. by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (review)

Reviewed by: The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics ed. by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis Enoch S. A. Jacobus The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. (Oxford Handbooks Series.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [x, 735 p. ISBN 9780199733866. $150.] Illustrations, multimedia companion Web site, bibliographic references, index. A wide variety of perspectives and interests tend to huddle together beneath the academic umbrella of the audiovisual. For this reason, The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics collects essays that appeal to a wide readership interested in the relationship between sight and sound. Even so, there is only so much ground one can cover in one volume. Editors John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis take Part I of the book to introduce the varied scenes set by the term audiovisual, most notably by inclusion of “nonor extracinematic forms” (p. 4), even as they acknowledge the debt that so many audiovisual media owe cinema (pp. 5–6). The introduction contains some unnecessary meandering, especially given the page count, but they strike a rich vein when they list fifteen points of consideration that face the broader field of audiovisual studies: 1. Audiovisual interrelations (how sound and vision interact) 2. Beyond audiovisuality (how other senses are, or might be, incorporated into the experience) 3. Narrativity, semiotics, and stylistic conventions (diegesis, interpretation, coded meanings) 4. Intertextuality (the relations of given audiovisual performances to other texts) 5. Intermediality (mode of performance as influenced by other media) 6. Technology (how it is used/what is being said about it through its use) 7. Space and place (onscreen/offscreen, diegetic/nondiegetic, natural/imaginary) 8. Temporality and synchronization (time’s relation to audiovisual elements, content, and experience) 9. Aestheticism and affect as resistance (affect of tone and mood through visual/aural experience) 10. Economic factors (what economic conditions liberate/constrain content and media of dissemination) 11. Interactivity and immersion (receiver participation in and suspension of disbelief in audiovisual experience) 12. The voice (use of human voice, how it manipulates and is manipulated to affect experience) 13. Soundtrack elements (interaction of music, Foley, dialogue, and environmental noises) 14. Audiovisual ecology (nature of sound in audiovisual performances and its relation to its surroundings) 15. Cultural identity, affiliation, and spec-tatorship (the biases of the intended audio-viewer) Most of these issues are addressed (to varying degrees) over the course of the volume, with some whole sections given over to them. I will treat each of the book’s sections in turn. This first section (“Theoretical Pressure Points”) comprises five chapters of a more philosophical nature. The first two chapters in this section address ideas just as relevant to readers with audio-only concerns as to those with an audiovisual bent, addressing the affects and notions of technology and embodiment (Lawrence Kramer) and the mentality of remix culture, musical ownership, and copyright law (Nicholas Cook). Obviously, these are music-heavy concerns, but are nonetheless tangential to the audiovisual [End Page 514] realm as a whole. To balance this, Michel Chion’s fascinating contribution narrows in on the non-musical audiovisual complexities presented by the translation of film dialogue into other languages. Broadly applicable in any narrative audiovisual medium is Anahid Kassabian’s suggested revision of the old diegetic/nondiegetic dichotomy, or even Ben Winters’s theoretical trident of diegetic/intradiegetic/extradiegetic (Ben Winters, “The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space,” Music & Letters 91, no. 2 [2010]: 224–44). Given the proliferation of video games, viral videos, and Web sites, the binary (or trinary) distinctions of diegesis may be less central than in older media. Steven Connor’s chapter discusses the metaphysical experience of film as though it were a living creature with which we share eyes and ears. Specifically, he discusses the peculiarities that sharing a body with the film presents and how we suspend the expectations of our normal experience (e.g., distracting noise or out-of-sight objects emitting sound). Part III, “Narrative, Genre, Meaning,” is divided into three subsections. The first of these, entitled “Changing Times, Changing Practices,” contains fascinating essays on documentary films, television serials, and big Hollywood blockbusters. This section even...

Estudos do Vídeo Musical

Recensão crítica dos livros Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, ed. por S. Frith, A. Goodwin e L. Grossberg (1993); Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, & Consumer Culture, de E. Ann Kaplan (1987); Le clip: histoire et esthétique, de L. Jullier e J. Péquignot (2013); e Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context, de Carol Vernallis (2003).

Interview with Music Video Director and Auteur Floria Sigismondi

IntroductionMusic video continually reconfigures and reasserts itself, emerging in new guises. It jumps platforms: from television, cable, DVDs to iTunes and YouTube; from high-gloss looks and extravagant budgets to footage shot on cell phones. Its borders are changing and uncertain. Few directors have stayed in the game through the genre's many shifts. Floria Sigismondi, along with only a handful of others - Hype Williams, Dave Meyers, Sophia Mueller - has been able to reinvent herself throughout music video's transitions.Interviews with music video directors are rare. Until recently there wasn't a venue for them. Academic journals have given little space to scholarship on music video and much less to the directors. This interview with Floria Sigismondi aims to give a sense of her craft and what it's like to work in an industry over a twenty-year period.1This conversation starts near the beginning of her career and takes us to the present. Born to Italian opera singers and raised in a Canadian industrial town, Floria Sigismondi was educated in Catholic girls' schools and received her artistic training at the Ontario College of Art. Her work draws from painting, illustration, sculpture, photography and film. This article will consider six of her videos: 'Little Wonder' for David Bowie (1997), 'Makes Me Wanna Die' for Tricky (1998), 'The Beautiful People' and 'Tourniquet' for Marilyn Manson (1999), 'Hurt' for Christina Aguilera (2006), and 'E.T.' for Katy Perry and Kanye West (2011).2But before we begin the interview, some context may be helpful. Today, participation with the audiovisual is informed by an explosion of platforms, formats and styles; but what lies behind these media changes? I (interviewer, Carol Vernallis) want to argue that music video has been a prime driver of this new media swirl. Music video's role has been under- acknowledged. Today's media relations become malleable and volatile in a 'mixing board' aesthetic, and our accrued knowledge about how to work fluidly with this material is informed by music video. Music video's major contribution to today's audiovisual turn stems from the fact that ways of placing music and image together are learned: they form genealogies. One can't just speed up Godard and put music against it. Today's unique audiovisual relations developed through music video directors' and editors' experiments at reconfiguring images and sounds. From its advent in the 1980s, music video deployed new technologies (cheap, reusable videotape) and was shaped by new commercial and social demands (the impetus to make it fast, creative, musical, different, wild). Subsequently, these changing audiovisual relations of music video have influenced practices in film sound and music; the soundtrack in toto has become 'musicalised': sound effects and dialogue are now shaped alongside composed music into musical phrases. Sonic features can also adopt leading roles, driving the film; or sound can mediate, enabling individual film parameters to come to the fore. The image acquires a sense of speed and flexibility: the image's contents can seem as if they had been poured from one shot into the next. Cutting, too, can bestow an almost percussive rhythmic drive. An image in the new digital cinema often avoids a ground because the sound wafts it along.These audiovisual forms of knowledge were shaped by music video. In the eighties music video was the laboratory: while commercials and films in that era tended toward tightly controlled client-author supervision and careful storyboarding, a music video director or editor might try anything. (Turn the image on its head and abut it with some red.) In the nineties music video directors streaming into cinema helped drive the new, audiovisually intensified, post-classical cinema.3 A second wave then immigrated, as industry funding, in response to free downloading, dried up in the noughties. Music video directors have flourished in the industry because they're especially attuned to the new technologies and the new audiovisual relations. …

Hollywood Theory, Non-Hollywood Practice: Cinema Soundtracks in the 1980s and 1990s * The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television * Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context

The last time a collection of screen music-related books was the subject of a Screen review, the reviewer Simon Frith was moved to note each work's ‘self-defeating … need to draw attention to their subject's neglect’ as well as the very limited manner in which the authors seemed ‘to be engaged with each other’.1 Judging by the books grouped together in the present review, the scholarship in the area is now much more collegiate, and the requirement on the authors to self-diagnose academic isolation seems to have become unnecessary. Annette Davison, K.J. Donnelly and Carol Vernallis share a plethora of critical references on music–image relationships, from Theodor Adorno to Philip Tagg and many points in between. A substantial canon of academic writing on music in narrative film now exists, and it can no longer be claimed that music video is a scholarly blind spot (as Vernallis admits). Of the various media formats discussed in the books under review, only television music remains relatively under-represented academically (though Donnelly's two chapters on the subject begin the process of addressing this absence).

The kindest cut: functions and meanings of music video editing

The kindest cut: functions and meanings of music video editing Get access Carol Vernallis Carol Vernallis Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 42, Issue 1, Spring 2001, Pages 21–48, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/42.1.21 Published: 01 March 2001