"Tracing Rhythm" Symposium

Bergen, December 6, 2022

Rhythm in Moving Image Media

By Professor Asbjørn Grønstad

Nothing is durable but what is caught up in rhythms. Bend content to form and sense to rhythms[1]

The point of departure for this presentation is the impression that rhythm perhaps has been an underexplored aspect in reflections and research on screen media - cinema, video, and television. As Alma Mileto observes in an interview about Sergei Eisenstein, rhythm may be considered “an anthropological means of organizing experience,” something that is "necessary to enact transformation" (quoted in Necsus, July 10, 2018).[2] In film studies, the vast attention given to questions of narrative and visual style has rarely been lavished on the subject of rhythm, despite its inescapable presence across the syntax of cinema. Editing is essentially a rhythmic expression, dialogue is immersed in rhythm, as are gestures and body language, and of course music, whether diegetic or non-diegetic. In this presentation, I will address some of the theoretical work on filmic rhythm that does in fact exist, consider some examples, and attempt to establish a (highly) tentative overview of the ways in which rhythm may be conceptualized and studied.

            In the description of this seminar it gets noted that rhythm is something that is omnipresent in the world, incarnated in a diversity of phenomena – the movement of our bodies, the beating of our hearts, the constant automation of inhaling/exhaling, sexual acts, music, the tapping on my laptop keyboard as I write these words, the precise synchronization of individual movements as Ousmane Dembele passes the ball to Kylian Mbappe in France’s win over Australia last week, and many, many more. Maybe it is the degree to which rhythm suffuses so much of our everyday activity that makes us – or me, at least – tend not to think about it very often. In its sheer ubiquity, rhythm in a sense goes unnoticed. 

            In the domain of art, rhythm is decidedly transmedial, or transaesthetic. While we might tend to see rhythm as an intrinsic property of music, it also forms part of the other arts, most certainly film, video, and television. In his Poetics, Aristotle considers rhythm as one of the human instincts, a “natural gift,” which along with imitation and harmony eventually gave rise to the medium of poetry.[3] As the linguist Émile Benveniste has pointed out, in Pre-Socratic philosophy the term rhuthmos referred to a transient and somewhat erratic form or figure. As Domietta Torlasco observes in her book The Rhythm of Images (2021), rhuthmos was something that would apply to “the form of a letter, the arrangement of a garment, and even a disposition of the character or mood.”[4] It was Plato, Torlasco suggests, that recodified the concept “to define the movement of bodies in a dance according to a metron or external measure; thus normalized, rhythm could fulfil the aesthetic requirements of a unified political community.”[5] In other words, before rhythm became something patterned and regimented, it was a form that oscillated, that was defined by improvisation and flow, and that pertained equally to both sound, image, and affects.

            The notion of rhythm did not escape the attention of some of the influential French thinkers associated with poststructuralism. Notably, Roland Barthes writes about the idea of idiorrhythmy in his 1977 lectures How to Live Together. In readings of texts by Thomas Mann, André Gide, Émile Zola and others, Barthes considers different ways in which to live congenially and productively with others through respecting their individual rhythms.[6] In the article “The Echo of the Subject,” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe claims that the Greek rhutmos constitutes one of the aspects, or “traits” as he calls it, of the principle of differentiation.[7] The concept also gets a mention in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987; originally published in 1980), where the authors propose that rhythm acts like an antidote to the chaos inherent in any given environment, which the call “milieu.”[8] But the theorist who has arguably approached the notion of rhythm in the most comprehensive manner is the poet and translator Henri Meschonnic (1932-2009). Known for his translation of the Hebrew verse of the bible, Meschonnic wrote a massive study of rhythm, more than 700 pages long. Published in 1982, Critique de rythme: anthropologie historique du langage offered nothing less than a novel theory of rhythm.[9] Heavily influenced by existing work in linguistics and in literary poetics (including his own, as well as that of the aforementioned Benveniste), Meschonnic seeks to redress the neglect of rhythm in studies of prose and prosody, proffering the thesis that rhythm in fact governs meaning.[10]

            Even though film and media studies have tended to concentrate their analytical and theoretical efforts on matters of graphic composition and narrative, as previously noted, one of the earliest significant attempts at crafting a more systematic theory of film was still very much preoccupied with rhythm. Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form – comprised of key essays he wrote between 1928 and 1945 – conveys the prominence of rhythm to the aesthetics of dialectical montage that was such a vital contribution of the Soviet Cinema of the 1920s. In a frequently quoted essay on Dickens and Griffith, Eisenstein recalls that when this cinema was unleashed in the United States in the mid-1920s, what the critics responded to the most was the films’ “devastating rhythm.”[11] Distinguishing this, which he also calls “affective rhythm,” from Griffith’s “school of tempo,” Eisenstein understands “true rhythm” as something grounded in “organic unity:”

Neither a successive mechanical alternation of cross-cuts, nor an interweaving of antagonistic themes, but above all a unity, which in the play of inner contradictions, through a shift of the play in the direction of tracing its organic pulse – that is what lies at the base of rhythm. This is not an outer unity of story, bringing with it also the classical image of the chase-scene, but that inner unity, which can be realized in montage as an entirely different system of construction, in which so-called parallel montage can figure as one of the highest or particularly personal variants.[12]

Elsewhere, Eisenstein observes that as a medium film possesses a capability for “sensuous thinking,” which it reveals in its incorporation of an array of rhythmic (and ritual) states, from breath to dance, sports, violence, prayer, and meditation.[13] Paraphrasing Eisenstein, the curators of the exhibition Sergei Eisenstein: The Anthropology of Rhythm(Rome, September 20, 2017 – January 19, 2018) hold that cinema can transform the human body “into a ‘living medium,’ capable of ‘processing, receiving, and transmitting images.’”[14] Not only that, but rhythm also has the power to reconstitute temporality itself, in that it harbors a potential for the disruption of a “horizontal” or sequential, progress-oriented conception of time. This is because rhythm is prone to repetition and circularity, or what some critics see as “regression.”[15]

            The “devastating rhythm” of Eisenstein’s montage, seen in film classics such as Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925), and October: Ten Days That Shook The World (1928), forms part of a wider historical context. During the heyday of the avant-garde movements in the early decades of the twentieth century, some filmmakers (for example the groundbreaking German cinematographer Guido Seeber) showed an interest in turning cinema into “a rhythmical art analogous to music.”[16] Earlier scholarship has interpreted this fascination as an expression of a passion for aesthetic formalism, whereas more recently it has been suggested that the gravitation toward rhythm in avant-garde cinema should be comprehended in light of what some critics see as “broader debates about rhythm, industrialization, and modern experience.”[17] One source of inspiration for these debates was economist Karl Bücher’s Arbeit und Rhytmus (1896, Labor and Rhythm), which in its consideration of traditional types of manual work defined rhythm as “the very essence of bodily labor.”[18] Extolling the conjunction of collective labor, work songs, poetry, and rituals before the age of the machine, Bücher painted a utopia of “communal rhythmical labor,” albeit one in the process of being superseded by the many technological breakthroughs of an accelerating modernity (his book came out almost simultaneously with the first film screenings in Paris in 1895). Crucial in this replacement of the human by the machine was the substitution of “the continuous circular motion of factory technology” for the “the back-and-forth rhythmical movements of hands.”[19] For Bücher, modernity entailed the subjugation of the body’s intrinsic rhythms to the temporality of the machine, in the process putting an end to what Cowan terms “the ritual, poetic quality of traditional labor.”[20]

            Given the pervasive interest in rhythm in several of the experimental modernist cinemas, it is maybe a little puzzling that the enthrallment seemed to wane in the following decades. My suspicion is that this might, at leastsubsidiarily, have to do with the transition in the late 1920s from silent film to sound and with the relative prevalence in the art cinema movements of the 1940s, 1950s, and onward for the long take and for what later was dubbed “slow cinema” (not that this kind of filmmaking does not have a rhythm of its own, of course, but that would be material for a different paper).[21] Regardless of the reasons for it oversight, I want to return to my initial statement that rhythm, as both a concept and phenomenon, appears underexamined in cinema studies, media studies, and visual culture, at least in the English-speaking world (one thing that I discovered when researching this topic was a striking discrepancy: a vast majority of the sources that came up in various databases were French). But if we take the supposition that rhythm is the most “originary and all-encompassing sense,” to borrow the words of Rebecchi, it undoubtedly deserves to inform inquries about aesthetic experiences to a much greater extent than before.[22]

            Far be it from me to take a shot at something as gargantuan as some kind of taxonomy of rhythm in film and television; what I will briefly propose here is merely an extremely rough and improvised sketch of possible ways in which to think about rhythm. My starting point is Eisenstein’s claim that film is a vehicle for “sensuous thinking,” which materializes in a set of rhythmic situations (breathing, dancing, meditating, and so forth). In her book Cinema Today, Elena Oumano writes that a film’s rhythm may be “written into the script and/or come from many elements within shots – machinery, animals, the movement and language of humans, passing shadows, light flashing through objects, and diegetic music.”[23] Her short inventory is suggestive of the heterogeneous components of the medium that all entertain some relation or other to rhythm.

            (1) Perhaps the most obvious terrain of rhythm in film is montage. In a sense, the art of editing is about the creation of soundless rhythm. The so-called continuity system that has its origins in Griffith and Classical Hollywood Cinema, also referred to as “invisible editing,” might not be the most fruitful way of illustrating this principle of “soundless rhythm,” but deviations from it often call attention to the rhythmic aspect. Here are a few examples: this segment from Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) is a form of rhythmic montage that shows more than a little family resemblance to Eisenstein’s “devastating rhythm” or dialectical montage. Hitchcock cuts very rapidly between the progression of the fire and actress Tippi Hedren’s stunned face. A considerably more complex case of aberrant or irregular yet highly rhythmic montage can be seen in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973). (2) A second stylistic avenue in which rhythm plays a part is mise-en-scène. An example are the Rhythmus films that the German painter, avant-garde filmmaker, and Dadaist Hans Richter made in the first half of the 1920s, which are sometimes taken to be the first fully abstract films in cinema history. The works play around with “elementary geometrical figures in motion organized into patterns,” to cite Malcolm Turvey.[24] But the composition of mise-en-scène could be rhythmic in more conventional films as well. In Way Down East (1920), for instance, Lillian Gish plays a girl who has been duped by a man, and filmmaker Griffith’s frames dexterously capture the rush of intense affects visible in her face. Noting how the immediacy of her cascading emotions would be impossible to communicate through a literary text, Erica Carter argues that the “effect of this play of facial expressions lies in its ability to replicate the original tempo of her emotions.”[25]Furthermore, she contends that the “rhythm of our inner turbulence will inevitably be lost in every literary narrative.”[26]  The face as an expressive site constitutes a salient topos in cinema (the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made a whole movie about it, Shirin (2008)), as does the movement of the body. Some would say that the fullest articulation of cinematic corporeal movement are scenes of violent action and of dance.

            (3) A third realm in which rhythm could manifest itself in the screen arts is sound. The employment of music is obviously rhythmic in nature, but character speech and dialogue could likewise inscribe rhythmic patterns. Just consider this brief segment from the screwball comedy classic Bringing Up Baby. Finally, there is an additional site of rhythmic communication – 

besides, music, background noise, and speech – that seems kind of overlooked in the critical literature on both film and rhythm: breath. In her treatise on images and rhythm, Torlasco finds that rhythm can be “a mode of being in the sensible – of the sensible” that may help us enunciate what she terms “the relationship between the aesthetic and the political.”[27] Breathing, as Davina Quinlivan has rightfully argued, “is rarely considered in film.”[28] As far as rhythm is concerned, breathing is one of its primary if not to say primeval manifestations. Before I started thinking about rhythm in the context of this seminar, I was struck by the significance of breath in the television show Better Things. Created for the FX channel by Pamela Adlon and Louis C. K. in 2016, the show – which was brought to its conclusion in April 2022 after five seasons and fifty-two episodes – centers on the character of Sam Fox (played by Adlon), an actress and single mother of three daughters living in Los Angeles. The series revolves around the everyday lives of this family and their extensive coterie of friends and relatives, often depicting the trials and tribulations of raising three somewhat unruly daughters with a candor and authenticity rarely seen in televised fiction. Whatever the plot of each single episode consists in, one constant is the cadence of Adlon’s breath – indisputably the most uniquely expressive in all of American film and television. Her style of exhaling can assume a plethora of different forms – she alternately sighs, groans, moans, wheezes, and grumbles her way through the events of her day. Her respirational behavior in this short segment is quite representative.

            Any of the fifty-two episodes could have been used to illustrate the same point. Yet remarkably, I have not come across any review or article that has even so much as mentioned what to me is quite a conspicuous part of the show. Adlon’s persistent sighting throughout is sufficiently elaborate and structured to merit attention as a poetics in itself, one that this seminar’s concept of “tracing rhythm” can help me develop further. Her character Sam’s diverse techniques of exhaling constitute rhythmic interludes in themselves, whereas their frequency across the show serves to punctuate discrete blocks of narrative action. Her breathing thus generates a sense of rhythm both on a micro-and a macro-level of the show. This aesthetics of the human sigh might be analyzed according to other rhythmic parameters, such as modulation, pulse, and ambient milieu, not to mention that it is infused with other determinants such as gender, class, identity, and narrative placement, to name a few. In her book on breath and cinema, Quinlivan notes how breathing upsets the “opposition” between visibility and invisibility and how it “represents a subtle dimension of our bodies that can be seen to be both inside and outside of ourselves.”[29] Wherever the process of breathing gets highlighted in audiovisual media, it may “shape our viewing experience,” Quinlivan writes.[30] Moreover, she reasons that breath is, as a matter of fact, a culturally specific phenomenon that can be both an index of “interior consciousness” and even a symbol of “the soul.”[31]Drawing on the work of the French cultural theorist and feminist Luce Irigaray, Quinlivan delineates three thematic frames in which breath might be explored; 1) “the sensory and contemplative nature of breathing,” 2) “the spiritual and sensible awakening of the body,” and “the body’s relationship with the environment and air which comes to represent the communality of sharing breath and living within a shared space of air.”[32] Irigaray’s model links up with, respectively, the corporeal, spatial, and intersubjective attributes of breath.[33]The latter also seems reminiscent of the points Barthes makes in his lectures on wholesome co-habitation through respecting the rhythms of others. In any case, breath as rhythm and rhythm in the form of breath (in for example Better Things) can be examined in all of these three contexts – body, space, and community/environment. That, however, will be the ambition of the second and as of yet unfinished part of this paper.

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