Cinema and the Audiovisual Imagination

Robert Robertson combines theory and practice in presenting cinema as an audiovisual medium, based on Eisenstein’s ideas on the montage of music, image and sound

So far, the study of cinema has been overwhelmingly visual. Robert Robertson instead presents cinema as an audiovisual medium, based on Sergei Eisenstein’s ideas on the montage of music, image and sound. Cinema and the Audiovisual Imagination applies an audiovisual focus to films by directors such as Spike Lee, Maya Deren, David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Werner Herzog, David Lean and Sergei Eisenstein. In addition, Eisenstein’s concept of ‘nonindifferent’ nature is extended to films beyond the European tradition – by Satyajit Ray, Kaneto Shindo, Akira Kurosawa and Chris H. Lynn– and the audiovisual and landscape is explored in films by Dziga Vertov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Paradjanov, Bruce Conner, Jack Chambers, Derek Jarman and Alexander Sokurov. The audiovisual in avant-garde animation by John and James Whitney, Len Lye, Norman McLaren and in the film experiments of Busby Berkeley are considered too. Responding to recent developments in technology which have enabled practitioners to work extensively with music and sound on an equal level with the visual track, the book also examines the audiovisual creative process in opera, in a music/film collaboration with Dennis Dracup and in Robertson’s own music/film Oserake and The River That Walks.