Academy

In this article we refer to the figure of the Russian filmmaker Aleksandr N. Sokurov, one of the most important and influential directors of our time at the international level. Based on a conversation we had with Sokurov at Lenfilm in St. Petersburg (Russian Federation), the article considers philosophical and aesthetic concepts of his artistic proposal in relation to some specific and precise examples of his work. Different conceptual, formal and technical elements of Aleksandr Sokúrov’s artistic universe are treated: the metaphysical idea of ​​human existence that he expresses in his films; his formal innovations, both in the flattening of the image and in the format of the frame; his conception of cinematographic language as, mainly, a plastic language; his search for the pure language of cinematographic art; his idea of ​​the impossibility of separating documentary from fiction; his conception of the role of art in society, etc. The text is organized in the form of dialogue through the following main themes: image and tradition, the idea of fiction and literature, and the role of man in History.

This article aims to describe the state of the art regarding the status of music in cinematographic and audiovisual theory. We investigate the space that theory has given to music in its theoretical apparatus from a synchronous point of view. A survey of the general state of the discipline is made, describing the two paradigms of the image-music relationship detected in the bibliography and also referring to some of the theoretical paradoxes that arise in the image-music link. Finally, we propose an original definition of the status of music in the audiovisual that we concretise in a three status model of music in relation to image: structural-ontological, narrative-functional and poetic-autonomousm.

Despite traditionally having been studied within the field of Musicology, the analysis of music in film should be approached as an aesthetic study of the relationship between «image» and «music» which is central to the cinematographic framework. From this interdisciplinary perspective, numerous theoretical and methodological issues emerge. The aim of this article is to investigate, using both a synchronic and diachronic focus, some of the key issues arising from this joint music-image approach, in an attempt to develop a theoretical framework for a joint aesthetic of music and image: a study of «cinematographic expression» that brings together the visual and the sound dimensions and which we call the «musicalised image», a neologism of our own creation.

This article tries to put in the historical context of the modern cinema part of the filmography that the Catalan director Pere Portabella (Figueres, 1927) developed, between 1967 and 1976, under the dictatorship of General Franco. In this period, Portabella built a cinematic form that may be considered to fall under cinematographic modernity which aims to subvert the foundations of the Institutional Mode of Representation. The author provides an avant-garde film corpus characterized by its formal and aesthetic subversions, as well as the presence of a strong political thematic. Under this premise, he shot Informe general (1976), a documentary film that aimed to be a political state of the art of the Spanish Transition.

Doctoral thesis. Cinematographic language is an artistic and communicative language that is certainly complex. The starting point of the work is that the presence of music in films defines part of the ontological, narrative, expressive, dramaturgical, psychological or even historical mechanisms with which the cinematographic language articulates its diegesis. Research is carried out around the study of music present in cinema, focusing on the cinematographic work that the Catalan director Pere Portabella made in the period between 1967 and 1976. Portabella, born in Figueres in 1927, developed his activity as a film maker from the second half of the 1960s. From a synchronic point of view, the episteme of the “contemporary image” combines, within itself, the duality of iconic value and sound and musical value. Thus, although this work studies music in cinema, and the aesthetic and formal relationship between image and music as a whole of cinematic expression, this is also a work on “image”, in the which tries to explain this fact: how music is an element that belongs to the mechanisms of the construction of the modern and contemporary image.

This article analyses the final sequence in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) using Michel Chion’s interdisciplinary method for the analysis of sound and image described in Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994). The analysis focuses on the separation and modification of both basic audiovisual elements —the soundtrack and the image— in order to analyse them and draw conclusions about the nature of the image-music relationship originally established by the author. To do this, the original music in the sequence of the film, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, is replaced with a random segment from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata BWV 54, and an analysis is conducted of how this manipulation modifies the diegetic space-time of the film.