The Power of Language: Sound and Vision in the Cinematic City

This joint paper performs a comparative analysis of Cinematic City, a seven-minute HD video film directed by Moore and produced by Parker in 2011, with reference to British artist film-maker John Smith’s collaboration with sound artist, Graeme Miller, Lost Sound (1998–2001), and his seminal early works, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) and Appropriations (1975), questioning the “illusionism of cinema” and “the power of language to condition how actually we see images” (Smith, 2018).

Commissioned by Plymouth Arts Centre, Cinematic City was funded through a South West Screen and Arts Council England Cinema City Artist’s Moving Image Award; the film takes a 21st century look at Plymouth City Centre's post-second world war architecture, particularly the buildings from the 1950s and the 1960s, contextualised by a collage of voices from the soundtracks of local television documentaries broadcast during the 1980s.

Illustrated with extracts from the films, the presentation explores and discusses the intuitive strategies deployed by Moore and Parker and by Smith, with particular reference to the dissonance created through the parallel reception of spoken word and screen images. In Cinematic City, the contemporary views of the city centre playfully subvert the authoritative presenter’s voiceover and the interviewees’ perceptions and experiences of a lost city, swept away by the planners’ vision. In contrast, Smith’s fictional narration in The Girl Chewing Gum exemplifies “the role that language plays in the production of filmic meaning and asserts the absolute impossibility of immediacy and neutrality” (Balsom, 2015).

Delivered as a 20-minute video paper as part of the 'The Afterlife of Found Footage' panel convened with Romana Turina (Associate Professor, Arts University Bournemouth) and Ming-Yu Lee (Assistant Professor, Shih Hsin University, Taipei) for the Essay Film Special Interest Group.