Audio-visual collisions
Holly B. Rogers · 2019
Many early music theatre works, embraced topics similar to the neo-realist cinema, its audiovisual aesthetics were very different from the smooth textures and structural and immersive cohesion of narrative film. Mainstream film, including that in the neo-realist tradition operates through an audiovisual flow so tightly synchronised as to engender a filmic illusion of unity and realism through discrete editing that effaces its materiality, as can be seen in the paradoxical audiovisual flow of Bicycle Thieves . In attempting to embody and substantiate intolerance, then, the Boston Intolleranza privileged artistic collision by highlighting its media specificity; the edges of each discipline were left in full view, frayed and angular, enabling the ‘confrontation of selected realities’ desired by Josef Svoboda. While hyper-immersive gestures have become relatively normalised, when moving image technology first entered the musical stage during the 1960s, it operated as a radical intervention not only into traditional theatrical gesture, but also into conventional modes of operatic and dramatic consum.