Visual Music Archive

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Come Closer 

(1952) 

by Hy Hirsh is the impossible three-dimensional occlusions of ribbons in Come Closer with wild infectious Caribbean carnival music. A three-dimensional experiment, best viewed with 3-D glasses.

In the visual music films of Hy Hirsh his exquisite taste shows up most strongly: in the parallel between the impossible three-dimensional occlusions of ribbons in Come Closer (1952) with wild infectious Caribbean carnival music, or in linking the jagged moving camera and staccato cutting of images of Paris posters in Defense d'afficher (1958-59) with an equally frenetic Cuban jazz. Similarly the mellow Modern Jazz Quartet sounds that accompany the fluid reflections in Amsterdam canals of Autumn Spectrum (1957) or the layers of metallic reflections from Constant Nieuwenhuis' sculpture in Gyromorphosis (1957) seem so perfectly matched as to render comparison with predecessors tike Walther Ruttmann's In the Night or László Moholy-Nagy's Lightplay Black White Grey (1926) irrelevant. One should also note that Hirsh recorded his own sound from live performances so that they are not exactly equivalent to the appropriation of commercial recordings so common in later films.

 

Source: William Moritz "Hy Hirsh." in "Articulated Light: The Emergence of Abstract Film in America", Boston: Harvard Film Archive, 1995

 

 

Come Closer, 1st generation, Film

Reading

Sons et Lumières (2004) – A History of Sound in the Art of the 20th Century (in French) by Marcella Lista and Sophie Duplaix published by the Centre Pompidou for the excellent Paris exhibition in September 2004 until January 2005.


Curated by the Pompidou’s Sophie Duplaix with the Louvre’s Marcella Lista, the show required a good three or four hours to absorb, with its bombardment of sensory and intellectual input, including painting, sound sculpture, sound/light automata, film and video, and room-size installations. (Frieze Magazine)

American Magus: Harry Smith (1996) demonstrates how differently Harry Smith appeared to friends from each circle, offering personal recollections that present a multidimensional, largely contradictory picture of the man. The films, paintings, and recordings of Harry Smith pay tribute to his genius. Filmmaking, painting, anthropology, musicology, and the occult - his knowledge of each was encyclopedic and firsthand. As might befit a man of such varied interests, his circles of friends were large and, for the most part, wholly independent. (Experimental Cinema)

Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 (2005) traces the history of a revolutionary idea: that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music. Over the past one hundred years some of the most adventurous modern and contemporary artists have explored unorthodox means to invent a kinetic, non-representational art modeled upon pure instrumental music. (Amazon)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994) by French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception. (Colombia University Press)

Len Lye: A biography (2001) by Roger Horrock tells for the first time the story of an extraordinary New Zealander, a brilliant artist with an international career who never lost the informality, the energy, the independence of spirit of his South Pacific origins. Len Lye began as an unsettled working-class kid with limited prospects and became a leading modernist artist in London and New York. Roger Horrocks's exhaustive study of Lye has taken many years and is based on interviews with many of those close to the artist as well as on voluminous documentary sources. (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery)

Len Lye (1901-1980) was an experimental film-maker, poet, painter, kinetic sculptor, eccentric and ebullient personality. Len Lye was one of the few filmmakers working in inter-war Britain to have established an international reputation in experimental filmmaking. Though his British oeuvre was by no means limited to the making of abstract films, this was the area that most interested Len Lye and he has sometimes been viewed as the only genuine avant-garde filmmaker of this period. (screenonline)

Symphonie Diagonale (1924) - original title: Symphonie Diagonale. In Diagonal Symphony by Viking Eggeling, the emphasis is on objectively analyzed movement rather than expressiveness on the surface patterning of lines into clearly defined movements, controlled by a mechanical, almost metronomic tempo. (Standish Lawder: "Structuralism and Movement in Experimental Film and Modern Art, l896-192l", doctoral dissertation)

© Center for Visual Music

 

Study No. 8 (1931) - original title: Studie Nr. 8 by Oskar Fischinger. He "did not have enough money to buy the rights for the second half of Paul Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Despite the lack of the finished ending of the music, this study remains the most complex, most stunning, and for the artist the favorite and most important of the black and white films." (Dr. William Moritz, Canyon Cinema)