Bridges Go Round, a study of the effects a soundtrack has on a film’s images, presented the same footage of a bridge in the same way altering only the soundtrack. The first presentation employed jazz improvisations that, though a 50’s film, took the mood to a 1940s noir film, as the saxaphone floated into and tangled with the wires of the bridge. The second employed early electronica. The clicks and beeps were synced with edits and various moving images that took the film into the realm of a sci-fi atmosphere or an episode of The Twilight Zone. The film itself is a montage of bridge images with color tinting. Shirley Clark, the filmmaker, took viewers through, over, across and under various bridges of New York city, in a swift but not manic journey. Water- and cityscapes were superimposed behind the bridges.
Likewise Leighton Pierce took some mundane footage of truck stop restaurants and paired it with an exquisite soundtrack that lifted the images from pedestrian to powerful. A ceiling fan is just a ceiling fan until paired with the dramatic swooshes that later accompany it. The visual style puts no interpretation on the images, they simply are. An old man stirring a cup of coffee is very unassuming until we hear the anxious clink clink clink.
Both of these films seem to draw on the Kuleshov effect in which one shot is meaningless until paired with another element (be it another shot or in this case a sound).
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