Temporal Polyphony: Overcranking and the Integration of Sonic & Visual Layers in Screendance

Whereas the practice of undercranking was idiomatic to early cinema, overcranking has permeated throughout the visual rhetoric of contemporary film making and is an oft used device in screendance. The ability to slow down visual time by shooting at frame-rates higher than the final presentation rate facilitates an expressive compass which ranges from the nuanced to the dramatic. Appearing predominantly in avant-garde contexts since the 1920’s, as exemplified in the works of Vertov, Clair, Riefenstahl and Vigo, slow-motion emerged as a common feature in mainstream cinema from the 1960’s onward. In contrast to the pan-narrative impact of undercranking in early cinema, most instances of overcranking were initially limited to individual sequences in which slow motion was used as a cinematic device with narrative effect. Vsevolod Pudovkin’s recognition of slow-motion as a ‘profound and precise’ device, capable of drawing attention toward a particular moment, deliberately removed it being considered a simple filmic distortion. On the contrary, Pudovkin, along with many others, embraced slow-motion as one of films most poetic narrative devices capable of drawing out a poignancy in movement. More recently, the transition from film to digital storage has made slow motion effects a common feature and in some instances enabled levels of time-dilation previously reserved for scientific movement research. The resulting frequency of its usage has transformed its initial narrative specificity into a visual trope, a filmic shorthand in which the slowing down of time adds a sensuality that draws attention toward the qualities of movement or imparts significance to a chosen event. Removed from the vectors that underpin narrative cinema, slow-motion becomes a filmic device well suited to the concerns of screendance in which movement and temporal structures are dominant. However, implementing slow-motion in audio-visual contexts introduces compositional and perceptual challenges. The significance of sounds’ role in defining the temporal movement of the image become especially apparent in slow-motion contexts since temporal manipulations of sound are morphologically destructive in contrast to similar modifications in the visual domain. The two dominant processes of temporal elongation in sound, pitch-shifting and time-stretching, result in transformations that dramatically alter their character and associated imagery. Unlike visual slow-motion, where the figurative essence is retained, acoustic elongation distorts either the sense of the sound objects scale or dissolves its structures into textural environments. Directors and sound designers can choose to accept such morphological distortions (as in Bill Viola’s Anthem) or may decide to avoid synch sound altogether by providing an alternative sonic counterpoint, invariably using music or other unrelated sounds. Alternatively, unmodified sounds may be resynchronized to coincide with the slowed down visual events thereby creating a perceptual polyphony in which sight and hearing are in temporal counterpoint. This approach, when applied with sensitivity, can result in the retention of the phenomenological essence of the audio-visual scene or bring about a perceptual tension (as in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams) without highlighting the underlying technological processes at play. The application and development of such perceptual polyphony is of particular significant in screendance.