(Quietly) Noisy Images: Sonic Landscapes, Audiotape and ‘the New Musicality’

Abstract

This chapter explores the relation between sound and image in Antonioni’s films of the 1960s. It considers how the ostensibly quieter films of the 1960s – in which dialogue becomes sparser and from which extra-diegetic musical soundtrack is all but eliminated – have crucial affinity with contemporaneous transformations in music itself, where the diffusion of new mass media technologies such as audiotape and television, acted as powerful catalysts for experimentation with noise and attention to soundscape. In particular, I trace here a connection with the experimental practices of John Cage, musique concrète, and composers including Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono associated with RAI Studio di fonologia musicale.