The screenplay is both a procedural planning document utilised to segment and guide the production of a film, and a literary text that generates poetic and emotional resonances informing the dialogue between the text and the constructive readers, the director, the cinematographer, the sound editor, the actors, and all the other people that collaborate to create the film. These poetic and emotional resonances, often set in motion by cross-modal relationships promulgated through literary devices, construct the harmonies and dissonances of that which will be seen and that which will be heard in the mediated hypertext of the film. While such poetic resonances are often explored to comprehend the mechanisms of a film text’s visual elements, the aural qualities and resonances have often been neglected. Particularly in terms of how such aural qualities and resonances are manifested and constituted in and by the screenplay text itself.The thesis also comprises a concurrent practice-based writing project, in the form of a feature length speculative script. The construction of this creative artefact constitutes a practical craft component of ‘active making’ that will feedback into the critical analysis and realize forms and materials that will constitute new points of analytical departures. This approach will not only provide an analytical model, but also a source for analysis itself.
This thesis examines the interconnected relationship that exists between sound and moving-image in the music-video. The flow of images used in many music videos often carries no definite meaning. Rather, the viewer must perceive the physiological sensations of the video’s audiovisual expression to make sense of it. Thus, both the expression and the perception of music-video is a cross-modal process. Using Vivian Sobchack’s theory of cinesthetics as a framework, the thesis contends that the music-video produces an aural visuality in which sound can be cinesthetically expressed and perceived as image and the image perceived and expressed as sound.
The carnival, through its formalization into the carnivalesque and its subsequent transposition into art, has been one of the most important elements of artistic expressions opposing the monolithic norms, values, and truths of the established order. With its links to Menippean discourse, as well as the fantastic, the carnivalesque facilitates an organic combination of disparate elements, polyphonic dialogism, and ambivalent significations in order to provide representations that can examine the deeper questions of life and death. This honourts thesis examines how multiple layers of meaning can be created in cinema through the use of the carnivalesque.
An essay on Vivian Sobchack’s idea of ‘cinesthetics’ and cinema as a synthetic extension.
An essay on Vivian Sobchack’s theoretical approach to the phenomenology of film.