Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image by Nicolas Pillai (2016)

Fortunately, there now is a growing interest in the relations of jazz to the media; currently the emphasis is on representations of jazz in film, it seems.

Nicolas Pillai focuses on three non-narrative works only, which is a good selection for a thorough study as he has “… identified cultural moments in which interactions between jazz, animation, film and television have proven mutually transformative.”

Taking into consideration a development that (roughly, though) first had jazz identified as an element that compromises any narrative movie’s plot, then as any plot endangering jazz’s existence in the movies (with massive under appreciation of the music put away in a hardly audible background soundtrack) up to the current tendency to experience jazz in a film as strong and independent element representing the role of music in today’s society.
“This book intends to demonstrate how methodologies from film and television studies can enrich our understanding of these texts, and how, by viewing them merely as records of performance, we diminish them.”

Pillai in the subsequent development discovers a new ‘visual language’ or rather a ‘language of jazz’ that draws from both film studies and linguistic vocabulary. But then, he wonders, how does a visual language of jazz function, what exactly is it and where are the limits of this language? Furthermore: how shall the vocabularies of film studies, jazz studies, television studies, musicology and musicians be treated? Which discipline struggles hardest to preserve an exclusive version of a mythology of (live performed) jazz? For the generic process of art production and the subsequent presentations of it are strongly related: “The audiovisual representation of jazz… is a primary articulation of jazz’s cultural contribution, forming one basis for how we appreciate and understand music.”

Therefore, in three chapters, each about 30 pages long, he concentrates on 1930s British experimental filmmaker Len Lye, who painted directly on celluloid and used jazz/latin music for the soundtrack in A Colour Box. Then on the photographic work of Gjon Mili for the short masterpiece Jammin’ the Blues (1944), and finally on the BBC jazz show Jazz 625 from the 1960s.

By adding a lot of background information, as well as technical data and details on camera angles and lighting, he shows that obviously at different times, there were seemingly countless opinions of how jazz should visually be presented/accompanied to have either entertaining, informative, or educative features. Thus it was introduced to the cinema and TV audiences in various manners, for example, by oversimplifying the music, pushing it in the background to make room for exaggerated talk, or heavy post-production editing or technical aspects of the presentation itself.
Pillai is a research fellow in the School of Media at Birmingham City University, UK, and has published many articles on jazz in the media.

A very interesting study that brings jazz studies and film studies together comfortably and in lucid language enlarges the range of both research fields.

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2017

Nicolas Pillai. Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image (International Library of the Moving Image). I.B.Tauris, 2016, 192 p.