The Eye & the Ear

The Eye and the Ear was produced in England in 1944 as the last film of the Themersons. They returned here to the issue of image and sound integration, which had strongly informed their entire practice. The film is a musical and visual experiment based on the analysis of the manners of transposing sound into image and vice versa, in a pursuit of finding such a method of combining the two that would not lead to a mere mutual illustration, but could ensure coherence of types of content hailing from each medium.

The soundtrack consists of four songs from the cycle Słopiewnie by Karol Szymanowski, sung by Sophie Wyss in English. At the beginning of every part, when one song changes into another, the artists’ comment appears to address the actual method of relating the sound to the image and the reverse, and then give it a go in practice.