I See and Hear in Screens.

Embodiment in Film, Music Video and Concert: Pink Floyd's Brick in the Wall
By Mihaela Brebenel The aim of this essay is to analyse the sound and image dynamics and the way these shape the lived body in film, television and a live performance where the constant element is Pink Floyd's song Brick in the Wall. The same song relates differently to three types of screens, creating a specific relationship with the moving image as a sequence of the soundtrack in the 1982 film The Wall, part of the music video promoting it and as part of the band's live performance in 1994, accompanied by an impressive visual show. The Skin of Screens Screens' constant presence in our lives, be it cinematic, televisual or electronic has driven film critics and media theorists to a more in depth analysis of the impact these experiences have on our bodies. Theories of embodiment in film have extended Merleau-Ponty's notion of the lived body and its relationship to the world, focusing on, as Jennifer M. Baker stresses, the dialectics of the body as ''always at once a subject engaged in conscious projects of the mind and an object of the material world.''1 Therefore, the body is both the subject that perceives the world and the object of the world through perception. Considering, alongside Merleau Ponty's view, that all perception is embodied perception, we cannot sepparate the perceptive stimuli that we receive from the world from how they are interiorized in our bodies. 2 We perceive the world with our entire sensorium apparatus, attached to our living bodies and our existences are, in return build on these sensorial information. From all of the senses, it seems that theorists turn most to the haptic experience in order to create metaphors for this perception dialectics, as skin, in a broader sense of the term, represents ''a meeting place for exchange and traversal because it connects the inside with the outside, the self with the other''3 Skin acts like a two-way material that absorbs information from the outside, but also produces specific information in response, ''it constantly enacts both the perception of expression and the expression of perception''.4 In a similar way, the body in the moving-image culture we are presently part of and which is mainly mediated by various types screens, becomes both a perceiving subject, as well as an object of perception.
1 Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye. Touch and the Cinematic Experience (London: University of California Press, 2009), 17. 2 ibid., 17. 3 ibid., 27. 4 Ibid., 27

As Viviane Sobchack points out, the presence of technology in our lives shouldn't be simply regarded as an instrument, but as a new form of skin in the sense mentioned above, as it is part of our bodies, of how we live and perceive the world or how we create and engage with certain meanings.5 Moreover, within the moving-image culture, ''each technology not only differently mediates our figurations of bodily existence but also constitutes them.''6 Our body-logic that we used to perceive the world with is now extended with a versatile techno-logic prosthesis, one that changes shape with each type of screen that ''differently and objectively alters our subjectivity while each invites our complicity in formulating space, time, and bodily investment as significant personal and social experience.''7 Considering Sobchack's point of view, I will focus in the next part of my essay on the comparative analysis between the cinematic experience of the film The Wall, the televisual experience of the music video for the song Another Brick in the Wall and the electronic experience in Pink Floyd's live performance of the same song. These three types of screens offer the viewer's body three layers of new 'skin', acting both as a mediator and creator of our engagement with the song. I will begin my analysis with the 1982 musical film The Wall, focusing on the scenes that precede and continue with the soundtrack Another Brick in the Wall. The scenes before the start of the song portray three young children running on a field, approaching a railway tunnel. A close up of a box of bullets they open and start sharing from offers a first hint of what is about to happen; they are going to place the bullets on the tracks for the train to ride on, creating an explosion. But only one of the children goes into the dark tunnel, the train is approaching as he tries to set the bullet on the track, apparently the typicall suspense scene is about to unfold as the child pulls from the tracks in the last moment. Our bodies are fully engaged with the scene, the feeling of danger accelarates our pulse, the feeling of release decellarates it as the child pulls back. But the next scene rises our engagement again as from the small windows of the passing train hundreds of hands reach out to the child, their faces covered with masks. The scared child is then seen wearing the same type of mask and, as the train rides away, the image of a teacher appears at the end of the tunnel shouting the lines "You! Yes, you! Stand still laddie!" This is the most intense moment in the scene and now the first tunes of the songs start playing. The role of maintaining the engagement that was constructed so far through images is taken over by the song's increasing beats, guiding our affects into the next scene which takes place in a classroom. The same two characters- the child and the
5 Vivian Sobchack, "The Scene of the Screen. Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic Presence, in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 136-137 6 Sobchack, V. 136 7 Sobchack, V. 137

teacher- and their relationship are now at focus, the images showing a mocking attitude of the student's poems ("The laddie reckons himself a poet"), followed by a scene of physical violence the teacher hits the child's hands with a ruller. A close-up of the hands and his facial expression create a sense of disgust which later takes another shape in the close-up of the teacher at home, forced by his wife to eat a piece of food he doesn't like and then re-appears in more scenes of beating that the teacher applies to the child. This three scenes are closely connected to our bodily senses, as we can associate the disgust we feel for violence to the bitter taste the food we don't like leaves in our mouths. As the food is not clearly shown, the audience can freely associate it with any type of food they dislike, thus creating a strong bodily engagement from their part. Moreover, the images showing marching children wearing the same masks as the train prisoners in the first scenes re-creates the fear of not knowing what is about to happen, where are they heading in their march. The suspense is brought up again and reinforced by a choir of children singing Another Brick in the Wall chorus ("We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control..."). This is the point when disgust and the associations with food are highlightened again by the images of the children falling from an assembly line into a meat grinder and coming out as minced raw meat. This close up image of the raw meat, juxtaposed with another close-up, that of the teacher's face shouting out the words "If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding." creates an increasing sense of disgust that resonnates strongly with our affects. This disgust now reaches climax both in the images of the raw meat and our bodily reactions, therefore the next scenes become completely justified, releasing our bodies of tension. They show children revolting, tearing and destroying the classrooms, bringing down a brick wall with hammers and burning everything in the courtyard, while their teacher struggles in their arms for release. Their rebellion coincides with the moments our bodies, engaged in the images and sounds of the film feel the need of de-tensioning, thus we can participate entirely into the destruction, feeling the release of the destructive act as if we are taking part in it. Therefore, we can conclude, as Viviane Sobchack notes in her book, that the film achieves a state where it is stirring my bodily senses and my sense of my body8. Furthermore, if we think that this embodiment process takes place in the cinema theatre, where the lights are turned off, the size of the screen captures our sight and the speakers our ears, then we can say that the cinema screen acts as a second skin, touching the skin of our bodies, creating a two-way engagement which triggers affects and responses. But what happens in front of a smaller screen set in our living rooms, where the lights could be on, you could be standing or not necessarily paying attention, where other factors may intervene in the viewing and engagement process? In my opinion, our senses are still stirred by the moving
8 Vivian Sobchack,"What my Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh" in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 60

images and the sounds and our bodies still become aware of their senses, but the process by which this happens is reduced and more redundant. Firstly, taking into consideration that the music video is almost half the length of the part of the film analysed above (3:15 versus 6:56 minutes), one could think that the visual information should be more concentrated, the same amount of information should fit in half of the time. However, this wouldn't be taking into consideration the medium's characteristics and the audience's attention span. Therefore, the information is reduced, not extended. Secondly, again taking into account the overall engagement of the viewers with television, which is lower than that with cinema, the music video is more redundant, the majority of scenes being shown three times or more. Thirdly, adaptation to the medium triggers the appearance of animation, which takes a central part in the construction of engagement. Nevertheless, animation is used in the film as well, but it's role in the economy of the video is highlighted by its repetitive use. On the other hand, taking into account that in the music video, one of the most engaging scenes of the film the children falling into the meat grinder- is replaced by animation could raise questions of censorship imposed by television networks on the airing of such strong scenes. Having all the above in mind, how is the embodiment process carried out when watching a music video? Another Brick in the Wall begins with shots of a city, then a playground where children are running and develops in crescendo to a point when the image of a marionette, a gigantic string puppet moving its head towards the camera, with red light eyes and an open mouth. In the music video, unlike the film, the images start from a relaxed stage, portraying a city and children then evolving into a shocking image of the puppet, surprising and intriguing. The song plays from the beginning, increasing the tempo of associated images, the affect is triggered by this crescendo of image and song and the unexpected appearance of the image. The explanation for the image doesn't come right away, more images appear on the screen- an animation of a teacher resembling the marionette, engaged in a sort of dance, followed by a scene of real children walking near a wall and another animation of the teacher pushing children into a meat grinder. The fast juxtaposition of images creates curiosity and each of them triggers short-term feelings of relaxation (images of children), surprise (the puppets), disgust (meat grinder), followed by feelings related to claustrophobia, as a wall closes around something undistinguishable and then again familiarity combined with emotion as you see and hear the children choir. These visual elements are then repeated and juxtaposed in different moments of the song, emphasizing the short-term affects they create. Here, the embodiment is not constructed over a number of scenes in order to reach climax at a certain point, as it happened in film. The music video rather gives us short pulsations of embodied experienced, then mixes them in unexpected forms in order to achieve the desired engagement. Even if you have seen all of the elements at some point in the viewing, your body is bound to react

and you are bound to become aware of its reactions because of the fast, unexpected association of images. Moreover, when you think you know what to expect, your expectations are turned over by a new image intervening into the process, introducing a new affect, as does the marching hammers animation at the end of the video, juxtaposed with images of real children walking on the streets for only under two seconds and then continuing. These flashes of images correlated with the music aim at creating flashing affects. It is almost like, aware of the lower level of engagement in television than in cinema, the music video does not claim that it could stir, using Sobchack's9 terms, your bodily senses and the sense of your body in the same deep level, but tries just to poke these and awake the sense of the body for short periods of time, as much as to become actively engaged in the viewing. Reflecting now upon the role of screens in live performances, some background is needed to understand the phenomenon of embodiment through these screens. Going back to the early moments in cinema history, we should bare in mind, as Tom Gunning points out, that "in the earliest years of exhibition the cinema itself was an attraction."10 Considering that in the early days, the place where cinema-related machines as the kinetoscope and where films where shown was in or near the amusement parks or other places of mass entertainment, it is not a surprise that screens have come to be widely used in live performances. On the other hand, these amusement parks where strongly correlated to lived experienced, where your body was fully engaged. Concerts and live performances, on the other side, have always triggered body responses from their spectatorscheering, clapping, dancing along, rising of hands in the air. The appearance of screens in such events has a role of extending these bodily responses, creating a two-level embodied experience. First of all, through the shared experience of listening to the music and through a shared representation of that music on a screen our experience is extended with a second layer of skin. The viewers' body reactions in a live performance are undeniable and we have all experienced them at least once in our lives: reactions of the skin (goose bumps) or even visceral (the so-called emotion butterflies in the stomach while waiting for the concert to begin), lungs at work in an almost uncontrolled scream of joy. What I am arguing is that a screen directs the viewers attention to a shared experienced, extending these reactions. It is interesting how we use the verb to see in order to describe going to a concert (I'm going to see a concert), that is to experience some visual experience of the band playing and, nowadays, some cinematic experience through a second pair of eyes, the screen. And Pink Floyd's performance of the song Another Brick in the Wall in 1994 starts with a
9 Vivian Sobchack, What my Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh, in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), 60 10 Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attraction(s): Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 383.

pair of round lights moving over the audience like a pair of eyes. After a crescendo of the music and a laser show, the entire screen then lights up with the image of a pen scribbling over a text. This is the only image used on the screen during the performance, as the rest of the visual show is composed of variations and alternations of black and white, light and dark. This is very important because it emphasizes the role of the screen in relationship with the music, which is to create emotions, feelings through the most basic images possible, through variations of light and darkness. The pulsating, beaming of light, the appearance of long and short rays followed by darkness only to start lighting up again even stronger, that is what the eye-shaped screen in the concert produces. If we are to take into consideration only the basic effects this light show has on us (enlarging and reducing the size of our pupils or the automatic frowning), the screen obviously generates a bodily reaction in the viewers. But in addition to these basic reactions, we can think, as Gilles Deleuze, that the black or white screen no longer has only a structural value, but has a genetic one: with its variations and tonalities, it acquires the power of a constitution of bodies (), the power of the genesis of postures.11 Applying Deleuze's concept, which derives mainly from cinema studies, to the visual performances in concerts, we can conclude that the screen, in this case, has resorted to the essence of cinema, the play-upon light and darkness to engage our senses and in that, it has managed to constitute a new body, one that is present in the event, that feels the experience entirely and is aware of its senses. All three instances analysed above have a common trait, they make use of image and sound to engage our senses into an experience mediated by a screen. However, as we have seen, the embodiment levels are different in each experience and this is mainly because of the medium and the screen used. At first sight, one could argue that the differences in embodiment in the three screens is actually given by the differences in the relationships existing between image and sound, and as these relationships are created by the specificity of the screens themselves, we can say that we hear and see in screens. Moreover, given the fact that the same song is connected to different images to create different types of embodiment, the screens are the ones that give us a lived experience and a body. The song being a constant and the images variables, it can seem reasonable to conclude that the differences are due to the variables - the images and the platforms for their delivery- the screens. But can we apply this inductive argument that easy when it comes to the lived bodies the screens create and is the distinction that clear between image and sound? On the hegemony of the image Most of the literature on sound in film focuses on a critical approach of the extensive interest film critics have been giving to image in comparison to sound and how that has affected the
11 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, (London: The Athlone Press, 1985), 200.

general view on the importance of sound in the economy of a film. Although this statement is now starting to be considered a clich in the industry, there is a certain degree of truth behind it and the explanation resides mainly on ideological grounds, as Mary Ann Doane considers.12 According to her argument, sight is the privileged sense with which we understand the world and hegemony is driven by a culture whithin which the phrase "to see" means to understand, the epistemological powers of the subject are clearly given as a function of the centrality of the eye."13 In this view, the eye is the part of our bodies that offers us the possibility to understand the world, as images are a truthful representation of that world or, at least, more truthful that what the ear can represent through sound. Taking this argument further, it implies that sound should be "placed on the side of the emotional or the intuitive."14 and that if the ideology of the visible demands that the spectator understand the image as a thruthful representation of reality, the ideology of the audible demands that there exist simultaneously a different truth and another order of reality for the subject to grasp."15 This line of thought separates the two senses into two distinct operations through which we make sense of the world the intellectual, epistemological reign of sight and the emotional, intuitive reign of hearing. In my opinion, leaving sense as a task of the eye and attributing sensibility to the ear, would imply that all embodiment experiences are refused to the eye. In sharp contrast, as I have pointed out earlier, perception acts as a breathe-through skin that engages all the senses and produces a response to the environment in return. Therefore, this radical separation of modes of knowledge not only leaves out the possibility of reversed modes of perception, where, for example, hearing can act as an epistemological instrument, but also sets aside their intrinsic connection as parts of the perceptive apparatus. Moreover, in the same way sight and hearing are connected into our bodies, bringing visual and auditive stimuli to be interpreted and then released as reactions, in screens Image and sound are linked together in a dance. And like some kinds of dance, they do not always have to be clasping each other around the waist: they can go off and dance on their own, in a kind of ballet. There are times when they must touch, there must be moments when they make some sort of contact, but then they can be off again."16 Considering the three types of screens I have analysed earlier in the essay, three imagesound relationships emerge. While in the six minutes part of The Wall, sound and image are physically together (they are both part of the same material support), they are structually connected, the images dance closely with the sounds. On the other hand, in the music video, the two are
12 Mary Ann Doane, Ideology and Practice of Sound Editing in Film Sound. Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) 54-55. 13 Mary Ann Doane, Ideology and Practice of Sound Editing in Film Sound. Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 54-55. 14 Ibid, 55 15 Ibid., 55 16 Frank Paine, Sound Mixing and Apocalypse Now: An Interview with Walter Munich in Film Sound. Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 357.

physically together, most of the times separated but coming together at certain points (the choir singing), while in the live performance they are physically separated (the sound comes from the speakers, the images are on the screen) and apparently they are structurally separated but they come together in a dance, especially through rhythm. This brings forward another important point that Frank Paine makes in his article, that even though image and sound are not always close together in their dance, there is -there has to besome kind of connection being made, a mental connection. Out of the juxtaposition of what the sound is telling you and what the picture is telling you, you (the audience) come up with a third idea which is composed of both picture and sound and resolves their superficial differences."17 One could say that there is a symbiotic relationship between image and sound when they come together in connection with a screen and this relationship is created mainly through montage, in the broader sense of the term, in the sense of creating a new meaning. The early films felt the need of sound and the invention of talking movies has revolutionised cinema, and now we can witness sound's need for images in live performances. As S.M. Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, and G.V. Alexandrov convincingly argued in their 1928 manifesto, Sound, treated as a new montage element (as a factor divorced from the visual image), will inevitably introduce new means of enormous power to the expression and solution of the most complicated tasks (...)"18 This statement is as valid today, in the analysis of sound and image relationships in modern types of screens, as it was more than eighty years ago, as the role of this image-sound dance is not to make us gaze only at the incredible performance of one or the other, but to encourage us to marvel at the beauty of the dance itself, stirring our senses as the two move along the dance floor, which is the screen. Michel Chion, reviewing the arguments of the manifesto, highlights a very important point, that its authors emphasize against using sounds as flat literal illustrations of images, and in favor of audiovisual counterpoint, wherein sounds declare their independence and act metaphorically, symbolically."19 Images and sounds are connected through rhythm and each function as metaphor and symbol that follow an overall rhythm, achieved by montage as, however you look at it, montage has two inseparable functions: narrative, and rhythmic generalisation of the narrative.20 Therefore, the narrative function of montage underlines the images' and sounds' role as metaphors and symbols in the construction of the narration. The rhythm that links them together gives the

17 Frank Paine, Sound Mixing and Apocalypse Now: An Interview with Walter Munich in Film Sound. Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 357. 18 S.M. Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, and G.V. Alexandrov, A Statement in Film Sound. Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 84-85. 19 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 11. 20 S.M. Eisenstein, Selected Works, Volume II Towards a Theory of Montage (London: British Film Institute, 1991, reedited 1994), 227.

effect that the new entity now formed has on the viewer. But, nonetheless, even if the montage doesn't have a narrative function per se, as is the case of the visuals, the images and sounds still work as metaphors but the main point of focus is now the rhythm and the effect it has on our senses. V.I. Pudokin brings into discussion yet another aspect of the human perception of rhythm, which can be considered of major importance in embodiment theories later developed. When we perceive the world, we are already engaged into a subject-object dialectics through rhythm, the rhythmic course of the objective world and the tempo and rhythm with which man observes this world.21 Bringing our perceptive rhythm in line with the rhythm of the world is feeling the world's rhythm, engaging with it through our senses. What the relationship between image and sound does through the mediation of screens is to create a representation of the world in a rhythm that we can tune to. The world is a whole rhythm, while man receives only partial impressions of this world through his eyes and ears and to a lesser extent through his very skin. The tempo of impressions varies with the rousing and calming of his emotions, while the rhythm of the objective world he perceives continues in unchanged tempo.22 In conclusion, the rhythm of image and sound resides in the relationship they create in a dance. This dance is montage. Each type of screen imposes a different type of montage, therefore a different rhythm of image and sound. However, the aim of each rhythm is the same, to re-create a world for the viewer, a representation he can tune his inner rhythm of perception to. To a certain extent, the dance between image and sound can be compared to the dance of the senses in the objective-subjective process of embodiment. The senses are engaged in a dance they perceive on the screen, sight and hearing become partners in a synchronous dance with image and sound. The aim is to reach a common rhythm between screen and audience as two milieus, the point of interconnectivity where senses and screens are tuned, due to the fact that ''rhythm is located between two milieus, or between two intermilieus, on the fence, between night and day, at dusk, twilight or Zwielicht, Haecceity.23

21 V.I. Pudovkin, Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film in Film Sound. Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 87. 22 Ibid., 87. 23 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Wiltshire: CPI Antony Rowe, 2004), 346.

References Barker, M. Jennifer. The Tactile Eye. Touch and the Cinematic Experience (London: University of California Press, 2009); Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. The Time-Image, (London: The Athlone Press, 1985); Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Wiltshire: CPI Antony Rowe, 2004); Doane, Mary Ann. Ideology and Practice of Sound Editing in Film Sound. Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Gunning,Tom. The Cinema of Attraction(s): Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006); Eisenstein, S.M. Selected Works, Volume II Towards a Theory of Montage (London: British Film Institute, 1991, re- edited 1994); Eisenstein, S.M., Pudovkin, V.I., and Alexandrov, G.V. A Statement in Film Sound. Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Paine, Frank. Sound Mixing and Apocalypse Now: An Interview with Walter Munich in Film Sound. Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Pudovkin,V.I. Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film, in Film Sound. Theory and Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Sobchack,Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004).