Songdelay

Joan Jonas | Songdelay |1973 |  Still from 19 minute video work

How wonderful to be reminded of this work by Joan Jonas, which first resonated with me as I thought about signalling (and performance) in relation to film-making - around 2021-2022 ( I think I saw it at Tate Modern.) 

At the time of writing you can view it here in full. 

I continue to find this film inspiring for its sound (often out of synch or in opposition to normal 'rules' of sound use), its amazing locations (complete with massive passing cargo ships), its playfulness and its down to earth approach to some quite wild ideas. I'll let Princeton University Art Museum explain it further:  

"Songdelay records an improvisational performance Jonas staged with young artists in downtown New York at the Hudson piers, then a derelict area slated for redevelopment. The film is divided into two parts. The first shows a series of vignettes of the artists improvising with props—sticks, a hoop, a metal rod—interspersed with shots of participants clapping their hands above their heads, moving their bodies in angles and arcs along the piers. In the second part, performers tilt mirrors to send flashes of sunlight toward the camera, at times completely saturating the celluloid and overexposing the film. The performers playfully exploit an idiosyncrasy of perception—the delay between the processing of visual and auditory stimuli. Breaks between scenes or vantage points and overexposed celluloid were maintained after the editing process, foregrounding the film’s status not as documentation of the performance but rather as a distinctive work of art that embodies Jonas’s process-based experimental practice."