Thus, what has triggered my interest is a fascination with the mutable tempo-
rality–not to mention the spatiality–which appears as a new aesthetic of post-
production. In the last decade, a new temporal dynamism has expanded and
vitalized the playing field between the realms of still and moving images, with
a key feature being the dynamic speed control of various sorts. A privileged
playground for such forms has been the music video, like Jonathan Glazer’s
video for the Radiohead song,Street Spirit(), Chris Cunningham’s video
for the Portishead song,Only You(), as well as his independent video pro-
ject,Rubber Johnny(), Max Giwa and Dania Pasquini’s video for Craig
David’s song,The Rise and Fall(), some of Michel Gondry’s videos, and
videos by contemporary music video directors like Francis Lawrence and Dave
Meyers. In these, and in many other contemporary music videos, we may find
more or less prominent examples where the initial temporality of body move-
ments as performed for the camera are partly overruled and controlled in the
post-production process. The cinematic mechanism of automated reproduction,
guaranteeing a temporal correspondence between the profilmic movements and
the movements we eventually see on screen, grounds what we may callordinary
audiovisual discourse. In music videos like the ones mentioned above, this corre-
spondence is suspended by a performative temporality staged in post-produc-
tion, producing the mutable temporality explored in the following. What forms
does this aesthetic take, what does it offer, and how can it be historicized? These
are the main questions informing this article.
Hans Richter and Film as Rhythm
When considering the peculiar connection between music and image mani-
fested in recent videos like Cunningham’sOnly You, which excels in visual
rhythmicity, it seems appropriate to revisit the German Dadaist Hans Richter.
As an artist taking up the new medium of film, which a number of avant-garde
artists of his period did, Richter formed part of the sweeping changes in artistic
production addressed by Valery and Benjamin, most prominently in thes
ands. In aarticle, Richter claimed film toberhythm, and explained
how he sought the development of a common language for expressing human
emotion through the temporal movement of abstract forms:
The emotional world, as well as the intellectual, has laws governing its expression....
Just as the path of the intellectual formulating power leads to thought, as a justifying
moment of intellectual activity, so the emotional formulating power leads to rhythm
as the essence of emotional expression.Mutable Temporality In and Beyond the Music Video 161