Читать книгу Performance / Media / Art / Culture - Jacki Apple - Страница 16

Radio especially is really about images for me. It’s not about language per se, or theoretical musings. It’s really about making an image happen that gets into your brain….I think it is about cinema. I think you see it. If you listen to it you don’t have any choice but to see it.

Terry Allen

Radio Cinema. The phrase itself seems a contradiction in terms. Unless of course you came of age in a car, speeding down the American highway with the radio turned up, pumping out the soundtrack to the wide screen panorama playing itself out on the windshield. Big cars and rock ‘n’ roll and gravelly voiced disc jockeys traveling down Route 66 from the New Jersey suburbs all the way to LA. Rebel Without A Cause meets The Graduate. It’s a whole montage of images and sounds. Lives played out to Alan Fried and Wolfman Jack¹ and Janis Joplin, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, the Supremes and The Doors, Good Golly Miss Molly and Blue Suede Shoes. Recalling the role radio played in his teen years in 1950s Lubbock, Texas, Terry Allen told me “… a lot of us, maybe ten or fifteen people would go out into a cotton patch in our cars and park ‘em in a circle with the headlights facing in. Everybody would tune to the same radio station. We would turn on our headlights and turn up the radios and DANCE in this circle of cars ….” If that’s not cinematic I don’t what is!

Still, the traditions of narrative fiction in radio are rooted in theater. It has understandably been a playwright’s medium, not a cinematographer’s. The ear supersedes the eye in aural space. Thus stories have been told through dialogs and monologs. However, the generation of American artists whose youth was spent in the company of transistor radios and car radios also grew up in the embrace of visual media. Along with their cherished childhood memories of radio’s golden years, they brought both a sophisticated knowledge and an innate understanding of film language and cinematic syntax to their radio work in the 1980s that radically altered the mode of storytelling and exploited the potential of language to manifest vivid images in aural space. In terms of story structure the linear chronology of the play was replaced by the principles of montage. The fade gave way to the seamless cut, the close-up and the longshot, and the mise-en-scène became as important as the characters.

Most notable amongst the artists who chose to make movies for radio, or “radio cinema,” are the collective works of visual artist, musician, writer, and performer Terry Allen. Allen is a compelling storyteller, and as a visual artist he understands the basic principle of the screenplay as a map — “show me, don’t tell me.” Employing a screenplay format and numerous filmic references within the text, as well as a consciously imagistic mode of storytelling Allen also brings to his work a recognition of aspects of American life usually not represented in contemporary art — that of white working-class culture and history. He is also known for his politically sophisticated but down-home in-your-face lyrics and eclectic hard-driving country band. As a songwriter and musician with a Texas country voice, he is also cognizant of how to turn four minutes of words and music into a Technicolor mini-epic that resonates with the history of where we have been and where we come from. Thus, structured like treatments for feature films, his twenty-seven minute radio pieces are vivid portraits of American life. They are also a form of cultural autobiography in which the landscapes of the American psyche are seen and heard not only through our cultural icons and images, but in the rhythms, cadences, and intonations of speech. Speech is culture.