Where Film Meets Music

28 July 2015 | 6:58 pm | Dave Drayton

'I Show Films To Music With No Rehearsal.'

Until the premier performance of Hypnosis Display in Leeds in June last year, the two artists collaborating on its creation — Clipson and sound artist Grouper (Liz Harris) — had no idea how each part would complement the other, if it would at all.

"When she played the first time, and I played the film for the first time, that's what it was. The first time to see it and hear it, and it stayed that way," says Clipson. "We decided not to be careful, not to plan it out too much, because there are all these benefits and excitement that I get from it. I find it much more interesting that it fell to these two things to interact by chance than if we had, you know, rehearsed it and analysed what the meaning of those things would be. I think it's more stark and enigmatic. What I do, I generally show films 'cold' in a way. I show films to music with no rehearsal, with no planning to the image, and very often the musicians don't see the performance before the show or during the show."

It's a level of chance balancing out the strict constraints Clipson places on his practice, using archaic filmstock like super8 and 16mm. "That constraint I find interesting because of the tactility, the sense of the surface and texture of film when it's projected."

Hypnosis Display was a commission from the Leeds-based Opera North Projects as part of their American Routes Series, its 75-minute length stipulated in the brief. Clipson's contribution is a mesmerising montage examining America with a resonant theme of mobility: a nation and a landscape moving.

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"The initial proposal to Grouper was to play to a silent American film, and she told me about that and I guessed what film they had proposed." It was 1927 silent film Sunrise by FW Murnau. "It's a great film but obviously I'm making my own films and she had the idea of proposing to them instead doing an original piece, a totally original piece. We were fascinated by America as an environment and there was this kind of subconscious metabolism, a sense of the rhythm of the country, its tension, its history, its space, and we wanted to absorb those things and let them flow through the film and the sound.

"My longer performances were, not cobbled, but they were structured sections of works; I didn't do one whole piece in two hours or 75 minutes before. And for Liz also to think of a sound collage that was kind of like a soundtrack but not a soundtrack was a challenge. We both work in a way where we want these two forms to remain with an integrity, you know, their own kind of self. Rather than she's playing to my film or I'm illustrating her sound, we wanted them to still follow the method and mode of our work up to that time. It's like two separate streams and the audience is really the participant, they are the ones who are going to associate this together or not, or find different parts they feel converse, so it's kind of like a challenge."