Soundtrack for Marcel Duchamp’s film
Gustavo Matamoros
Stereo electroacoustic soundtrack
Composed 2014
Duration: 7′05″
Commissioned by Bruce Posner for Flicker Alley
Soundtrack for Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma (1926)
I composed this soundtrack for Marcel Duchamp’s silent film Anémic Cinéma at the invitation of experimental-film historian and curator Bruce Posner. Bruce was a dear friend of Miami filmmaker Charles Recher, through whom we first met. As curator of Flicker Alley’s Masterworks of American Avant-Garde Experimental Film 1920–1970, Bruce commissioned me to compose a new soundtrack specifically for Anémic Cinéma. I was given complete artistic freedom and finished the work on September 25, 2014.
COMPOSITION
Duchamp’s film alternates ten rotating image spirals with nine spiraling arrangements of French wordplay. I treated each image spiral and the word spiral immediately following it as a pair.
Each image introduces a different low organ tone together with seven selected upper partials. When the corresponding words appear, the fundamental disappears and only its upper spectrum remains. The next image introduces a new fundamental and another configuration of partials. This process continues through the film, synchronized to every transition between image and text.
The source material came from organ sounds I recorded during a tuning session at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. These tones were tuned and detuned to create the fundamentals and spectral relationships used throughout the soundtrack. Translations of Duchamp’s French puns provided additional compositional hints, but the primary structure came from the film’s alternating visual forms.
Rather than illustrating the movement of the spirals, the soundtrack establishes a parallel transformation in sound: each complete tone is revealed with an image and then partially withdrawn when language appears.
DUCHAMP
Russell Frehling first introduced me to Duchamp’s work. Russell owned a physical version of Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs: a flat, covered box containing printed discs that could be made to spin on a turntable. Seeing those objects rotate gave me an early, direct experience of the relationship between flat images, movement and perceptual depth that later became central to this commission.
Reading John Cage subsequently made me aware of how much his friendship with Duchamp and his advocacy of Duchamp’s work helped renew attention to it. Duchamp’s influence is now everywhere, though his recognizable gestures are sometimes repeated without the attitude toward art that gave them their force.
LISTEN
Complete stereo soundtrack, 7′05″.
DOCUMENTATION
The two-page cue score maps the film’s ten image spirals and nine word spirals, identifies the selected partials for each section, and records the precise synchronization of every transition.
PUBLICATION
The soundtrack was published in 2015 as part of Flicker Alley’s Blu-ray/DVD collection Masterworks of American Avant-Garde Experimental Film 1920–1970, curated by Bruce Posner.
View the publication entry for Masterworks of American Avant-Garde Experimental Film 1920–1970.