Background

A short Super 8 film by → ↑ → which is exactly what the title says. The focus of the film, though, is the audiovisual effects generated by placing an alternative soundtrack to the original images. The spoken fragments are snippets of commentary remembered from watching the broadcast, making the film a deconstruction not only of the original broadcast, but also of the experience of watching the broadcast. The droning layers of built-up synthesizer noise obliterate the expected musical spectacle. This film set the agenda for Philip Brophy's altered/reworked soundtracks in numerous films and videos since: from 1982's Ads through to the 2000-2015 cycle Evaporated Music.

Credits

Filming, editing & soundtrack production - Philip Brophy

16m blow-up

1987

Melbourne International Film Festival

1984

Glasshouse Theatre, Melbourne

Super 8 original

1983

CONTINUUM 83 - Studio 200, Tokyo
ANZART SUPER 8 FESTIVAL - Australian Film Institute, Sydney
OVERLOAD - Glasshouse Theatre, Melbourne

1982

POPISM - National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
AUSTRALIAN INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS PROGRAM - Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC NIGHTS - The Mill Theatre, Sydney
FILM WORK - Theatre Royal Backspace, Hobart
Departure Lounge, Sydney
Melbourne Cineastes Society, Melbourne
Media Resources Centre, Adelaide

1981

City Studio, Sydney
RMIT, Melbourne

1980

Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, Melbourne

Overview

From the original 1982 programme note

The relationship between sound and image in film has always presented filmmaking with interesting effects and problems. Probably the most primary source of textual conflict (where conflict generates meaning) is the sound/image relationship: an inexhaustible dichotomy in the construction of a film text. In a way, every time you watch television with the sound down and a record playing you are constructing such a text. The sound and image texts feed and feed off each other. Through modes of deconstruction, these texts can be dislocated, scattering the meanings contained within them. It is through a simple play, a slight alteration with the delicate relationship between sound and image in already-constructed texts that the original meanings become unhinged, thrust into a new semantic context. The Opening Ceremony Of The 1980 Moscow Olympics is an attempt to not only set meaning into motion, but to also highlight the very procedure involved in such a deconstructionist process. In its play with meaning, this film is somewhere between a quote and a defacement.

Technical

Filmed directly from a television as it was broadcasting live the opening ceremony. The colour and contrast of the monitor were turned up full. No audio was recorded during the filming. The soundtrack was produced shortly after, once the film had been edited. When the film was screened in Japan, a Japanese dubbed version was produced, with translation and voice provided by the artist Akio Makigawa. After extensive screenings around Australia of the Super 8 print (with its mag-stripe stereo soundtrack), a 16mm blow-up print was made with funding from the Australian Film Commission.

a production