Questions of Attribution and Contribution: What Constitutes a Visual Music Film?

Abstract

Unlike some other forms of avant-garde film, on which one can consult volumes, the subject of visual music in experimental cinema has been under-represented in film history as a distinct category. As visual music draws on two distinct disciplines, film and music, it is intrinsically hybrid in nature. Its historical antecedence as a hybrid art form has therefore given rise to ambiguity surrounding it taxonomy. This is not unlike the problems of ‘attribution’¹⁵ and ‘contribution’¹⁶ that Thomas Elsaesser points out in relation to research on Dada cinema. Elsaesser asserts that the ambiguity surrounding what constitutes a Dada film is problematic, because the makers of Dada films often aligned themselves with movements other than Dada. For example, Fernand Léger was generally considered to be a Cubist painter, yet his film Ballet Méchanique (1924) was considered to be inherently Dadaist by Hans Richter.¹⁷ In the same fashion, Anémic Cinema (1926) by Marcel Duchamp is also referred to as a Dada film in spite of Duchamp’s protestations that it was not a film at all but an element of his motorised sculptures that he referred to as ‘precision optics’.¹⁸