Jazz as Visual Language

Film, Television and the Dissonant Image

Nicolas Pillai

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786721006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

This book provides a timely analysis of the relationship between jazz and recording and broadcast technologies in the early twentieth century. Jazz histories have traditionally privileged qualities such as authenticity, naturalness and spontaneity, but to do so overlooks jazz's status as a modernist, mechanised art form that evolved alongside the moving image and visual cultures. Jazz as Visual Language shows that the moving image is crucial to our understanding of what the materiality of jazz really is. Focusing on Len Lye's direct animation, Gjon Mili's experimental footage of musicians performing and the BBC's Jazz 625 series, this book places emphasis on film and television that conveys the 'sound of surprise' through formal innovation, rather than narrative structure. Nicolas Pillai seeks to refine a critical vocabulary of jazz and visual culture whilst arguing that jazz was never just a new sound; it was also a new way of seeing the world.

1

Len Lye: The Sensual World

Len Lye’s three-minute A Colour Box (GPO Film Unit, 1935) is an acknowledged classic of abstract animation. Made in the UK as an advertising film for the General Post Office Film Unit, its vibrant colours and shifting patterns still retain the power to startle and amuse audiences. Lye’s prominence as an early exponent of ‘direct’ film-making (in which an artist marks directly onto celluloid, thus circumventing the use of a camera) was but one part of his artistic practice, which included kinetic sculpture, painting and poetry. However, it is as a film-maker that Lye remains in the popular memory and it is as such that this chapter treats him. Most writing on Lye notes his enthusiasm for jazz and his use of it on film soundtracks; I have elected to position the jazz in A Colour Box as an engagement with contemporary constructions of nationhood. I argue that Lye uses jazz in a polysemic manner, interacting rhythmically with a cinema of attractions which nevertheless has a strong ideological basis. A Colour Box abnegates technology but, in doing so, makes technology central to its project. It is a film that embraces the culture industry. If, as Rhythm magazine claimed, Lye ‘translates jazz into celluloid’, we must then ask: what was the purpose of this interpretive act, and who did it benefit?¹

As Catherine Parsonage has argued, the British public’s early understanding of jazz was fundamentally racial, polarised between aficionados seeking to elevate the music by spuriously repositioning it within the history of the European classical tradition and those that realised that these manoeuvres were ‘unnecessary, superficial, and even racist’.² The landscape was made yet more complex by the plethora of jazz-infused dance musics vying for popularity from the Americas and the Commonwealth, all of which depended for their appeal on danceable rhythms and an exaggerated romantic exoticism.³ In some quarters, imported culture was a cause for concern; this was the era of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and a time when public debate on eugenics was ongoing. Meanwhile, the British demotic was being transformed by American slang (popularised through the cinema) and the pidgin forms of immigrants. The latter process of compression and reinvention was termed ‘creolisation’ by anthropologists, a suggestive term when we consider the title of the song that Lye selected for A Colour Box, ‘La Belle Creole’ (performed by expatriate Emilio ‘Don’ Barreto and his Cuban Orchestra).

In keeping with the preoccupations of modernism, A Colour Box draws attention to the circumstances of its creation. As Peter Vergo has observed, the early decades of the twentieth century saw a turn in Western art towards convergence between once-distinct creative practices, a breaking down of form in the pursuit of mysterious internal truths and a similarly inward-looking preoccupation with ‘the structural principles that underlay each art’.⁴ This self-referential quality is evidenced in A Colour Box through visual elements that evoke the film’s materiality (dots and lines which stand in for dust motes or hairs in the projector gate; stencils that mimic the sprocket holes of the celluloid strip or the shape of the scalpel Lye used upon it; the very liquidity of the paint itself), but also through the film’s formal characteristics (Figure 1.1). If, as Andrew Higson argues, the GPO Film Unit’s output was largely defined by a sanctioned ‘public gaze’ articulated through montage editing, Lye’s elision of not only camera but also cutting might be seen as disconnected from the Film Unit’s social purpose.⁵ This is certainly the way that Lye’s work has been positioned in previous accounts of the GPO Film Unit, as an interesting, but eccentric and contradictory, side-note.

Figure 1.1Visual elements evoke materiality in A Colour Box.

In this chapter, however, I will argue that Lye’s abstract films of the 1930s speak directly to those questions of race, identity and belonging that dominated public debates around British jazz at this time. I will suggest that A Colour Box belongs to a tradition in which ‘jazz, the image of jazz, and British jazz musicians have subverted and transformed narratives of nation’.⁶ In the aftermath of the First World War, this unsettling of nationhood reflected a much larger crisis of Western identity; Richard Overy notes that the ‘popularisation in the 1920s of the notion of entropy, for example, [had] undermined any sense of certainty or durability about the wider universe’.⁷ For many, jazz provided liberation from this ennui but, in his 1936 paper ‘On Jazz’, Theodor Adorno decried what he saw as its illusory freedoms. To Adorno, jazz was the ultimate commodity, betraying the pursuit of reconciliation between the individual and society by presenting that ideal as having been achieved. For Adorno, improvisation was mere ornamentation, ‘fundamentally ridiculous and heart-rending’ since the expressivity of the performer was confined by the restrictions of the jazz form. As Robert W. Witkin argues, ‘[w]‌hen Adorno rails against the products of the culture industry, against jazz and popular music, he is thinking of them […] as manifestations of objective and external force, as oriented to the bringing about of affects in the body of the subject and as undermining the subject at the level of the latter’s expressive agency’.⁸

It is striking that Witkin’s account of Adorno’s critique of jazz matches so closely those qualities which Lye found desirable in the music. I am not suggesting – as Adorno does with jazz – that this evidence of human expression (Lye’s inscriptions on the celluloid, or the rhythmic pulse of ‘La Belle Creole’) masks the film’s ideological project. Nor am I accepting Lye’s own quasi-cosmic conception of his audience’s surrendering to the sensual experience of the films. Both models assume an elision of technology. I would suggest rather that A Colour Box ensures that the circumstances of its creation are evident to audiences, creating a double address. The abundant sensual pleasures of the film are underpinned by constant reminders of the cinematic apparatus: a title that recalls antique technologies of sound and vision, imagistic brush strokes and stencilled sprocket holes (Figure 1.2), a deconstruction of language that is framed by conventional film titles listing information and signalling ‘The End’. Undeniably this foregrounding of technology serves an ideological purpose, shared by so many GPO films. What surprises perhaps is the boldness with which this ideological identity is announced; not skulking, like Adorno’s jazz, but dancing.

Figure 1.2Stencilled sprocket holes in A Colour Box.

Embracing the culture industry

Of eleven films directed by Lye between 1934 and 1940, nine have jazz soundtracks repurposed from commercially available records. Each soundtrack structures its film (with Lye sometimes credited as providing mere ‘colour accompaniment’ to the music), and the contribution of Lye’s musical collaborators – first Jack Ellitt, then Ernst Hermann Meyer – cannot be overstated. In 1938, Lye’s friend the poet Laura Riding published a monograph entitled Len Lye and the Problem of Popular Films, which devoted some space to his soundtracks. ‘Len Lye does not regard jazz as the ideal film music,’ she wrote, ‘but, until a theory of music develops that can be wholesomely adapted to films, he prefers to rely on jazz for support where music is necessary in a film’.⁹ Riding predicted a turn in his work toward tribal folk music, which Lye adopted in later films Rhythm (1957), Free Radicals (1958) and Particles in Space (1958). In her admittedly patronising attitude to the ‘masses’, Riding saw jazz manifesting the contemporary moment, meeting the modern audience’s ‘urgent and continuous need for confirmation of their being alive in this (to them) amazing world’.¹⁰ If we can ignore the elitism, Riding’s perspicacity must be applauded. The jazz in A Colour Box is transformed from its recorded state, enlivened by the audience’s experience over the film’s duration. In this section, I examine Lye’s aesthetic achievement in A Colour Box as part of the GPO’s institutional project and interrogate its status as both art and advertising.

Appointed to develop creative work for the Empire Marketing Board which would promote mutuality and co-operation, John Grierson oversaw a creative team of film-makers whose subjects depicted social realities in a fresh, poetic way. From the very beginning, Grierson’s conception of a British documentary movement was rooted in a paternalistic ideal that, as Ian Aitken notes, nevertheless ‘offered a thorough intellectual critique of capitalist modernity’.¹¹ Drifters (1929), directed by Grierson, depicts the spiritual connection between fishermen, wildlife and the sea in ‘a generalised and impressionistic account’ which lends its subjects ‘metaphysical significance’.¹² This film established a model that would continue to influence the work of the GPO Film Unit, in which the documentary observation of quotidian existence evinced symbolic and metaphorical visions of the nation, increasingly defined by depictions of benign bureaucracy. The closure of the EMB Film Unit in 1933 led to a transferral to the Post Office, where Grierson’s new GPO Film Unit benefited from carrying over some film-makers (e.g. Basil Wright, Stuart Legg, Harry Watt) and recruiting new talent (Alberto Cavalcanti, Humphrey Jennings, Lye). These newcomers were not always responsive to Grierson’s vision, with especial tension developing between Grierson and Cavalcanti. However, it is to Grierson that the credit must go for encouraging a collective spirit of experimentation – later in his life, Grierson would describe the arrival of Lye as ‘one of the happiest circumstances of our lives’.¹³ Basil Wright remembered the GPO Film Unit as a moment of opportunity which ‘meant a chance for Len Lye’, while Stuart Legg suggested that ‘Grierson was really training people’.¹⁴

For Len Lye, the patronage of the GPO Film Unit was hugely significant. His life in London had been ‘dogged by poverty’ and the GPO commissions provided ‘a measure of security’.¹⁵ After completing his studies in New Zealand, Lye had moved to Sydney in 1922, taking on commercial art commissions and learning advertising techniques.¹⁶ However, Lye had found more fulfilment in personal side projects, such as the building of a kinetic theatre,¹⁷ and his burgeoning friendship with the experimental musician Jack Ellitt, who was ‘strongly involved in modern music and art’.¹⁸ In 1926, on a whim, Lye took passage as a stoker on a ship bound for London. He quickly fell in with an artistic crowd – Kanty Cooper, Eric Kennington, Laura Riding, Robert Graves – who thought him ‘completely unspoilt, a real savage’, an outsider status that he played up to and which was to be reflected in his eventual status within the GPO Film Unit.¹⁹

A year later, Ellitt followed Lye to London. After working as stagehands, Ellitt and Lye did ‘fill-in’ work for animated advertisements, using their employer’s rostrum camera to begin work on their first film. Tusalava (1929) was a short cel animation consisting of around 4400 photographed drawings.²⁰ It took two years to make and garnered a mixed response. The experience was not a happy one for Ellitt, who saw his plans for an intricate synchronised score for two pianos dwindle to a perfunctory live performance by one piano at the film’s eventual first screening. In frustration, Ellitt destroyed the score.²¹ By the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsement
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Len Lye: The Sensual World
• 2 Gjon Mili: The Material Ghost
• 3 Jazz 625: Inform–Educate–Entertain
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Film and Television Programmes Cited