Director: Shirley Clarke
Year: 1958
Time: 8 mins
Music
Teo Macero
Louis & Bebe Barron
Eye of Sound: Produced with leftover material from a project purporting to document American landscapes, Bridges-Go-Round is a seminal exercise in montage and visual abstraction, with the cityscapes of NY working again as luminous background. Due to copyright/copywrong issues, Clarke commissioned two different soundtracks for the film, here presented in sequence, thus providing spectators with an excellent display of the all-intrusive power of sound in the perception of images: the same set of visual material is radically transformed with the simple addition of a different soundtrack. The first score is offered by a Teo Macero formation which remains unidentified but is highly reminiscent of some later works by George Lewis and, in a more oblique way, his collaborations with Miles Davis. The second soundtrack comes from the machines of the Barrons, well-known for their score in the sci-fi classic Forbidden Plantet. Despite their enormous differences, and the contrasting effect they have on the screen, the end result of the two scores is uncannily similar: Macero's composition (which, despite the presence of "jazz instruments" cannot be called jazzy in any manner) renders the superimposed bridges and buildings of NY the same alien glitter lent by the more or less "conventional" cavernous bleeps of the Barrons' electronic score.
http://rapidshare.com/files/397348877/bridges.avi
