About The Placeless, Flowing Space of Tones

The Placeless, Flowing Space of Tones, like my first film, Beethoven Machinery, is an attempt to create a visual translation of a work of music. Ideally the filmmaking would account for every relevant detail, note for note, but also the larger harmonic relations, and thus the collective drama of phrase and counter-phrase, of revelatory changes of viewpoint, of disorientation and unbearable suspense… leading in the end to some sort of superb resolution; even, perhaps, to a superb kind of despair. At any rate, this is how I experience the music often misnamed classical. Music of any kind, if it’s good, can stimulate me visually, but in great works from Bach to Miles, let’s say, I perceive the most dramatic, engaging architecture.

That said, The Placeless, Flowing Space of Tones is certainly far from realizing this synesthetic pipe dream. Perhaps one can only hope that the music suggests a language, and that the development of that language on its own terms becomes the film. The Placeless, Flowing Space of Tones may or may not succeed in this, but in my own eyes its attempt at synesthesia can seem naive in its eagerness to please, and not nearly as pleasing as intended. But the delightful and ingenious visual music essays of Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren often seem naive to me; naïveté may be equally a hazard and a precondition of seeking the synesthetic holy grail.

—Especially via the painstaking medium of personal animation. While visual music predecessors could only dream of manipulating objects in real time (not to mention color, light, texture and so on) as I can do on my laptop, my use of 3-D computer animation still feels to me as hand-made as nudging colored squares in tiny increments while shooting off frames. I am a spy in the house of simulation, misusing complex apparatus as blunt instruments, as if they were hammers or crowbars. But what I have found in each of my films is that by configuring a way of working from a few relatively primitive tools there is already the potential for infinite cinematic possibilities.

In most of my other films I’ve taken a motif from one of my isometric drawings as a starting point (please see my notes to the Wall Drawings), but The Placeless, Flowing Space of Tones invents its own vocabulary in response to the Allemande from George Frederich Handel’s keyboard suite in D Minor, HWV 447, as performed with unsurpassed expressive gravity by Keith Jarrett. (My film holds synchronization rights to Mr. Jarrett’s ECM recording.) The title is taken from Viennese philosopher Victor Zuckerkandl, who in his book Sound and Symbol; Music and the Eternal World aspired to account for the intense psychological effect of purely abstract music using spatial metaphors that I happened on as a college student lost in the library, almost half a century ago.