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1 James Lastra, Sound Technology
and the American Cinema:
Perception, Representation,
Modernity (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2000);
Robert Robertson, Eisenstein on the
Audiovisual: the Montage of Music,
Image and Sound in Cinema
(London: IB Tauris, 2010).
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2 Rick Altman, ‘Introduction’, Yale
French Studies, no. 60 (1980), p. 6.
James Tobias, Sync: Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press, 2010, 304 pp.
A N DY B I R T W I S T L E
While recent scholarship on film sound has done much to challenge the
long-standing visual bias of film studies, there remains surprisingly little
work that engages directly with cinema’s audiovisuality, and with what
precisely is at stake in the sound–image relations constituting the
cinematic text and cinematic experience. Aside from the seminal work of
Michel Chion and dedicated studies by writers such as James Lastra and
Robert Robertson,1 the issue of synchronization – surely central to any
discussion of cinema’s audiovisuality – has largely escaped sustained
critical attention.
Casting a long shadow over discussions of audiovisual synchronization
is the 1928 joint statement on sound published by Eisenstein, Pudovkin
and Alexandrov, in which the three Soviet directors argued that cinematic
sound–image relations should be governed by the principles of montage
rather than by forms of naturalism. While in spirit this manifesto proposed
an affirmative poetics of audiovisuality, it has nevertheless been called
into service by a strain of political modernism that has valued audiovisual
counterpoint primarily in terms of its opposition to classical cinema’s
dominant codes of construction.
Apart from the truth claims of documentary, and of realist practices
employing a direct sound aesthetic, historically it has been the illusionistic
character of naturalistic modes of representation that has perhaps most
exercised critics concerned with the ideological dynamics of synchronized
sound. Thus in the landmark ‘Cinema/Sound’ issue of the journal Yale
French Studies, Rick Altman described the naturalistic effect created by
synchronization of sound and image as ‘sound film’s fundamental lie’.2
The value judgement implicit in Altman’s commentary signals the fact
that political discourse relating to the synchronization of sound and image
528 Screen 52:4 Winter 2011
© The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved.
has been articulated primarily around the figures of naturalism and a
resistant other, constructing on the one hand an illusionistic, manipulative
cinema of deceit, and on the other a radical, anti-illusionistic and virtuous
form of counter-cinema. But despite the wealth of alternatives to classical
formulations of sound–image relations offered by the histories of
animation, documentary and avant-garde filmmaking – as well as by non-
naturalistic uses of synchronized sound within classical cinema – the
notion of a nonsynchronous, contrapuntal and dialectical use of sound has
been privileged over other audiovisual modalities within dominant
accounts of radical audiovisual poetics. Unfortunately, not only does the
critical focus that has been placed on audiovisual counterpoint ignore the
fact that Eisenstein saw in the congruence of sound and image tremendous
expressive potential, it has also meant that modes of synchronization

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which cannot be understood within this tradition have been neglected,
forgotten, ignored or dismissed as having no significant political dynamic.
Sync: Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time offers a much needed and
thoroughly radical revision of debates around synchronization, opening up
a range of different audiovisual modalities to political analysis, and
breaking the stranglehold that existing forms of political discourse have
had on discussions of sound–image relations. The author’s key move has
been to employ the notion of synch to address not only the relationships
between sound and image in audiovisual media but also those between
text and audience, focusing primarily on the experience of reception. This
bold move allows Tobias to consider what is at stake politically in the
affective dimensions of audiovisual spectatorship without ever losing
sight of the individual texts for which he offers detailed readings. Located
at the centre of this novel approach are the figures of musicality and
gesture, articulated through case studies that engage with a range of topics
and texts, including Eisenstein’s use of montage in Alexander Nevsky
(1938), Oskar Fischinger’s abstract animated film Motion Painting No.1
(1947), the work of film composers Hanns Eisler and Bernard Herrman,
cinematic and televisual representations of jazz, John Cameron Mitchell’s
rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), and the work of
multimedia artist Steina Vasulka.
In each of the book’s six key case studies Tobias explores the ways in
which concepts of musicality and gesture can be applied both to an
understanding of sound–image relationships within an audiovisual text,
reviews
and to audience engagement with time-based synchronized media. Thus
Tobias contends that the concept of musicality can be usefully understood
not only as a mode of articulation but also as a mode of reception. In
focusing on musicality and gesture in this way, Tobias challenges the
established ways of thinking about the audiovisual, redescribing time-
based media in terms of synchronization and temporality rather than
sound and image. This allows the author to reconfigure the films and
multimedia works he studies as ‘devices that diagram, express, and
interpret unfamiliar temporal relations’ (p. 1), and as ‘timepieces that
don’t tell time … but diagram it in affective labor’ (p. 34). Tobias then

Screen 52:4 Winter 2011 . Reviews

529
 proposes that these temporal diagrams open out onto larger historical
contexts and transformations; that is, not only do films and other media
works articulate particular forms of temporality in their presentation and
reception, but the relations that are forged between sound and image in
time-based media also tell us something important about our
understanding of the past, the present, and visions of the future. Finally,
seeking to understand the ways in which producers and audiences interact
with these various temporal streams, Tobias examines the affective work
undertaken in both audiovisual production and reception.
If the approach adopted by Tobias is highly original, it is also
complex and extremely challenging. In its attempt to think about the
relationships between sound and image, text and spectator, in an almost
entirely new register, Sync represents a hugely ambitious project. The

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multiple strands of Tobias’s analysis – labour, affect, politics, history,
personhood and publicity, musicality, gesture and temporality –
certainly make for a dense text, but one that is, paradoxically, loosely
woven, as there are perhaps too many concerns running through the
work for each to be resolved satisfactorily in relation to the whole. But if
Tobias’s approach is risky it is also exciting. Working outwards from a
particular historical moment, film, concept or debate, the author explores
the ways in which the historical and social location of a particular media
text, and its own articulation of space and time (achieved through
synchronization of sound and image), can be understood in relation to
spectatorship. The merits of Tobias’s ambition are clearly evident in the
chapter on visual music, which seeks to reclaim and review Fischinger’s
film Motion Painting No. 1. Tobias suggests that the visual music
project, exemplified by Fischinger’s work, has been marginalized within
histories of the modernist avant garde. At the same time, in the popular
imagination these works have been understood to represent an
(audio)vision of the future – in this regard sharing many similarities
with electronic music. The futural dynamic of visual music is evidenced
by the appearance of Fischinger’s Lumigraph colour organ in Ib
Melchior’s 1964 science fiction film The Time Travellers, leading
Tobias to comment, ‘Visual music … appears as ahistorical and futural;
it seems somehow indiscriminately present, a familiar achievement of
modernist aesthetics that is as yet technologically unfulfilled, a still-to-
be concretized new medium awaiting its avatar’ (p. 79). In signalling the
reviews

future in this way, Tobias proposes that Fischinger’s film can be

understood as a temporal diagram, ‘a mode of stylizing the futural
capacities of the cinema’s instrumentalities – or those of television or of
digital gaming’ (p. 80). While this analysis of temporality is in itself
highly productive, making connections between films produced in the
first half of the last century and the sound–image relations generated by
contemporary interactive media forms, Tobias also goes on to consider
the ways in which the streaming of sound and image in films like
Motion Painting pattern and articulate the duration of the film itself, and
its subsequent reception by an audience.

Screen 52:4 Winter 2011 . Reviews

530
 Ordinarily, studies of filmmakers working in visual music tend to
concentrate on matters of technology, technique and authorship, and in
this respect Sync offers a radical and creative alternative to existing
discourse on the topic, most importantly rethinking notions of the political
in relation to audiovisuality. However, while the journey undertaken in the
chapter on visual music is thought-provoking and at times exciting, the
conclusions it reaches are unsurprising. In the end, Tobias simply figures
the political dynamic of visual music in terms of resistance
to the early industrial cinemas, which marginalized the avant-gardes; to
fascism, which branded it impermissible; to the Hollywood studio
system … and also, finally, to art-historical methods that insist on a
critical avant-garde antithetical to the braided seriation of the popular,

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the technical, and the ecstatic. (pp.104-5)
Looking beyond the merits of individual chapters, the strength of the book
as a whole lies in part in the fresh perspectives it provides on familiar
subjects. Focusing on Eisenstein’s model of audiovisual correspondence
rather than the theories of vertical montage with which he is more readily
associated, and tackling Eisler’s dissonant synchronization through the
notion of hysteria, Tobias’s revisionist approach has much to recommend
it. Similarly his analyses of less well-known material – such as Hedwig
and the Angry Inch, the multimedia performances of Vasulka, and Larry
Clark’s 1977 free jazz movie Passing Through – serve to indicate an
alternative political discourse for sound–image relations. But while the
book is undoubtedly bristling with ideas, the sheer number of issues being
considered means that the thread of the author’s argument is sometimes
difficult to follow. Furthermore, the use of language occasionally obscures
rather than illuminates the ideas being examined. However, there is much
to recommend this book which, in providing new perspectives on the
political dimensions of audiovisuality, repays the close attention it
demands.

doi:10.1093/screen/hjr049

Tamara Trodd (ed.), Screen/Space: the Projected Image in Contemporary Art

(Rethinking Art’s Histories Series). Manchester: Manchester University Press,
reviews
2011, 214 pp.

ALISON BUTLER

Screen/Space is the latest addition to a small but growing body of

scholarship on the art form that cannot quite articulate its name: is it
artists’ film and video, gallery film, screen-based installation or post-
cinema? This uncertain designation is indicative of the fluid and
transitional nature of the form. In her introduction, Tamara Trodd explains
that the essays collected in this book (derived, with some omissions and

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