“There are those of us who when we look through a camera and listen through headphones ‘see-hear’ a world rich with intensive virtualities.”
“Don’t try to contain it, or sequester it in a discipline, or organize it into a method. Cineworlding is more-than making a film, it is the very making-thinking worlding calls for when it becomes cinematic.” - Erin Manning, Professor of Studio Arts and Cinema, Concordia University, Canada
Reviews
“CineWorlding is a deep dive into MacDonald’s highly original approach to digital audiovisual filmmaking and perhaps the most nuanced articulation of research-creation yet to come out of music studies.” - Ellen Waterman, Professor, Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada
“With CineWorlding, musician, ethnographer, and filmmaker Michael MacDonald poetically demonstrates how the cinematic medium creates new forms of thinking, knowing, and experiencing the audiovisual world we increasingly inhabit.” - Christopher Salter, Professor of Immersive Arts, Zurish University of the Arts, Switzerland
Michael B MacDonald, associate professor, Music, Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications, MacEwan University, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Below are the films referenced in CineWorlding.
A Cinematic Style of Thought
“In the third act of Another Day at the Office (2019), a career retrospective short film commissioned by Paris’ Pompidou Centre, Richard Linklater sits in a psychologist’s office inquiring about a potential ADHD diagnosis, but with no interest in pursuing therapy: ‘I used to think that the arts were some kind of calling, but now I think it’s just maybe . . . the right therapies for the right conditions.’ In this quick retort, Linklater points to the overturning of a modernist aesthetic inheritance. Art is not about a calling, the work of genius or separate from living in the world, it is the ‘right therapies for the right conditions’. This echoes Felix Guattari idea that ‘art is not just the activity of established artists but of a whole subjective creativity’ (1995: 91).” (1)
Où en êtes-vous, Richard Linklater ? | Cinéma | Centre Pompidou
On the Diagram
“In an early film I made with Dr Guillaume Tardiff called The Genius of the Violin (2012), we brought two musicians who played fiddle and one musician who played violin and created a situation for them to play each other’s repertoire. Each player struggled with the others repertoire and you can see it in their bodies and hear it in their playing. What is it that we can see-hear? It is the virtuality of the diagram in audio-vision (Chion 2019). The interstices between the physicality of an awkward body next to a flowing body in the visual-image and sound of two violin/fiddle lines in open conflict in the music, the audio-image.” (pg 38)
Living Flame of Love
“I intend to show the way that this transversal research-creation approach resonates with Simon Zagorksi-Thomas’s suggestion for a practical musicology (2022) while maintaining a commitment to artfulness. Artfulness is not a way of dressing up the documentary but instead investigates subjectivity, a topic that ethnography has long been troubled by. I want to suggest that research-creation studies of process subjectivity can only be done through art and that will never become subservient to observational documentary methods. My thoughts on this are not theoretical alone but come from experiences I have lived as a professional musician before becoming an ethnomusicologist.” (pg 77).
Quartet 2
“Quartet 2 (2010) was made for a graduate student conference where I worked with a composition student, Dan Brophy, to visualize musical themes. Our approach required me to explore the Deleuzian and posthuman literature around affect and non-representational aesthetics. As we worked through the musical tensions, and I attempted to explain back to the composer my analysis of what I was hearing, something like a visual imagination that I had not yet explored awakened in me. While my body felt the music, while I was struggling and ‘stammering’. I wanted to share this experience with other people. But what is this experience of stammering? It is certainly a process of thinking the ellipse, of trying to understand, a reaching out for clarity. But it is not resolution. And what does it mean to think non-representational thinking-as-process, an experience that finds its force in duration not primarily signification. “ (pg 102)
Round Dance and Media
“Round Dance and Media began as a cinematic study of music in an emerging Indigenous political movement called Idle No More.1 I blended approaches from music video aesthetics with experimental found footage films to produce a seven-minute film. While making the film I realized that my thinking about frame, shot and montage needed to be updated to include new technical process allowed by YouTube, digital video and digital video editing. I was also challenged to think about the politics of representation in political movements and I wanted to include within the film the symbolic politics that are enacted in contemporary media. Media, perhaps especially so-called progressive media, present themselves as informed. But as the short film makes clear, the images that Idle No More protesters use and the images that new media used to describe these round dance events were often vastly different from the round dance that I attended and filmed. The music from the round dance organized at the University of Alberta on 13 January 2013 holds the entire film together in the way a music video does. I will use this film as an opportunity to unfold a theory of the cineworlding that starts with the sound frame.” (pg.105)
Megamorphesis
“Megamorphesis (2016) is the first instance of my burgeoning posthuman awareness of the film as an image of thought in musicking. The film opens with a recording of a song that is going to be produced during the filming process. But not only that, the film follows the release of my book Remix and Lifehack in Hiphop (2016), which was a five-year ethnographic study with members of the Edmonton hip-hop community about the process of informal learning in popular music. Building on the approach to montage that I develop in Round Dance and Media, the film unfolds in three parts.” (pg. 112)
Unspittable
”Unspittable marks the beginning of a different type of screen production that no longer draws from observational documentary and instead draws from fiction or at least neorealism/ethnofiction which will be the subject of my next book Free Radicals. After screening Megamorphosis to a variety of audiences, I began to realize that the documentary approach allows for a particular kind of knowing and sharing. Even my attempts to stretch the format resulted in a film that did not quite get into the experiences of Hiphoppas in the city. For Unspittable, I turned to the ethnographic fiction (ethnofiction) pioneered by Jean Rouch.” (pg. 115)
Margø’s In Between
“Concepts and vocabulary for cinematic technicity and posthuman ecology are necessary. And so too is it necessary to recognize that this different kind of knowing, research-creation’s nonphilosophy, has equal value. Not better or worse, just different. In this sense research-creation is not new, but corrective and potentially decolonial. Posthuman research-creation starts from the ‘assumption that the cyborgs are the dominant social and cultural formation that are active throughout the social fabric, with many economic and political implications’ and that ‘technological mediation is central to a new vision of posthuman subjectivity and that it provides the grounding for new ethical claims’ (Braidotti 2013: 90). As disability studies has noted, ‘the “normal” body is itself the consequence of a set of discourses and has always been enmeshed with prosthetic technologies, institutions and networks . . . there is no “natural” body in this interpretation’ (Nayar 2014: 106). A posthuman proposition for the twenty-first century recognizes that ‘technological civilization has led to the emergence of an increasingly independent world of images which absorbs ever more attention and energy, and is governed increasingly by its own rules’ (Böhme 2012: 123) leading to a ‘technification of perception’ (Böhme 2012: 125). “ (pg. 125)
John Wort Hannam is a Poor Man
“I want to propose that cinematic research-creation is particularly well suited for an investigation of posthuman intimacy. Where a document treats forms as ontologically self-evident, cinema operates best when it deals with coming-to-form of extensive space. It opens up a way to investigate the extensive space without losing access to intensive space. My interest in intensive space is a consequence of experiences in making films. Often the decision to hit record is not conceptual but a feeling of atmospheric thickening, the affect of the intimacy of gathering form. It creates a kind of fuzzy-headed feeling like I am being pulled out of, or kicked out of recognizable space-time, and an intensity within experiences that begins to work on my perception, semblance, the uncanny feeling of the becoming seen of virtualities.” (pg. 149)
Pimachihowan
“The approach that I am developing does not intend to convince the viewer of something but is instead an invitation to enter into a thinking-feeling space. It is not possible to work relationally and have the cinematic form remain unchanged, remaining in the ‘perspicuous mode, favoring clarity over experience. Sensation often explained rather than felt’ (Harbert 2018: 5). As reviewers have noted on previous versions of this chapter, the location of music in the film is not at all clear, nor is the film’s relationship to ethnomusicology, as there are only three pieces of music in the entire film, no discussion with musicians and no music performance. Feedback from readers has helped me clarify the thinking-feeling in duration of Pimachihowan, a research-creation process that began by taking serious intuition (Manning 2016: 47): ‘Intuition is rather the movement by which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make use of our own duration to affirm and immediately to recognize the existence of other durations’ (Deleuze 1991: 33). This chapter will seek to clarify, or perhaps better, to explain and defend a ‘cinematic way of theorizing music’ (Harbert 2018: 5).” (pg. 190)
WE’RE TOO LOUD
“WE’RE TOO LOUD was a film I made just after finishing Pimachihowan. The more I thought about the work I was trying to do with this film the more I realized that my interest in process was primarily an interest in technocultural ecological assemblages and their productivity. The subtitle for the film is ‘An Ecomusicological Love Story’, which was meant to signify its location as scholarship and its 1960s handheld aesthetics was a none-too-subtle nod to Jean Rouch, to the heyday of observational rock documentaries like Woodstock and Sympathy for the Devil, shot at the period when Smith’s parents moved to Hornby. The eco-love story is not about romance, but intimacy. It is about the intimacy of writing songs, tending gardens, sharing (tending?) music with friends. It is about the way Breagan sees music and gardening as being transversal to each other. Cineworlding connects these two activities by cutting gardening scenes next to music scenes and situates them in a context of gentrification and precarity.” (pg. 214)
Elders’ Room
“If the body is populated with aesthetic and conceptual personae, as I argued in the last chapter, perhaps settler scholars are also composed of colonial personae, colonial diagrams. If solidarity with the commons is central to ethical futurity, its building is fraught with risk. There are power differentials between the settlement and the commons, the settlement and Indigenous nations, racially Othered communities that are also run through by class-based differences. The risk is not for technocrats of settlement, but for those who have already borne the brunt of enclosure. If there will be solidarity between the university-as-settlement and the commons, it will require engaging with truth and reconciliation. “ (pg. 237)