Margret (2005) Video/Music 3.30 min
12x15 cm monitor and headphones
(36 sec SD preview)
I
use music to create another dimension or space that I often juxtapose
with the visual space. I think sound is better suited forrepresenting
the materiality of the world being
portrayed in the image while music has the ability to be more internal,
representing the emotions. Michel
Chion describes two ways that music serves and affects the image in
film. Empathetic music illustrates the
feeling and the situation in the scene “by taking on the scene’s
rhythm, tone, and
phrasing”* and using music’s cultural codes for things like sadness and
happiness*. While anempathetic music (with a privative a-),
on the other hand, exhibits a “conspicuous indifference to the
situation, by progressing [in a]
steady, undaunted, and ineluctable manner: the scenes take place
against this very backdrop of
“indifference”. The juxtaposition of scenes with indifferent music has
the effect not of freezing emotion but rather of
intensifying it, by inscribing it on a cosmic background,”* with the
mechanical nature of the music
resembling the essence of cinema.*Margret
(2005) is a video/music work displayed on a 12x15 cm
monitor with headphones, portraying a miniature female character
wearing a white shirt with a little black
bowtie, black skirt and white tights. The character is inserted into a
black background, partially fading
into the darkness in a chiaroscuro manner, the black and white palette
reminding of silent film. The
anempathetic music is a simple, repetitive piano melody, like something
from a music box. The character turns
round and round in the darkness as if being propelled by the music,
until she suddenly falls down and
disappears into the darkness. The music stops. The character rises,
dusts off her costume and continues to
turn, the music starting over again. The camera zooms in on the
character with a clumsy, mechanical motion,
revealing her laughing, enjoying the rush of the movement, until she
falls again and fades into
the darkness, this time the music continues. The character rises again
and continues the same compulsive
act, only to fall down again and again and again, the music repeating
the same mechanical melody,
only the hit on the piano string becoming more intensified as the
character’s behavior reveals its
self-destructiveness. Once more the character rises, the music starts
from the beginning and together they
continue turning, until the music and image fade out.
* Chion.
Audio-Vision: sound on screen, p. 8
stills
from Margret
Installation
view from the Living Art Museum, Iceland
Installation
view from Frisör BEIGE, Berlin
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© Dodda Maggı
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