If Beale Street Could Talk, what’d be playing in the background?

First notes on music, film, time and memory

by Kwami Coleman (Gallatin Professor)

Film and sound recordings are illusory temporal media that require elapsed, clock time1 for playback and consumption. They are illusory in that each medium sets forth with unfolding events that may be nonlinear, cyclical and otherwise abstracted: in film, a scene sequence that distorts or fractures the chronology of the narrative or perhaps the frame rate of a particular scene (i.e. slow motion); and, in music, tempo, metre (incremental or fluid), strong accents against a uniform metric pulse (syncopation) and architectonic recurrences or transformations of motivic material in formal structure (i.e. sonata allegro form). Film and recorded music creators understand that their craft, in one way or another, requires the manipulation of at least two senses of time: that of the interior world of an art piece, which unfolds against the unyielding incremental ticking of exterior, ‘real world’ clock time. [Read the whole Article]

Originally published in Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics / Editor(s): Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, Lisa Perrott