Abstract
This chapter considers the philosophy of live-score film screenings in contexts of filmic diegesis, representation, and illusion. These performances hybridize categories of spatial co-presence/absence and temporal simultaneity/anteriority in media communication, disrupting the balance between audio-visual documenting and constructing of a posited prior event. They revisit a pre-sound-era aesthetic which by nature resisted the modernist need for a centered subject position and a uniform spectatorial space in which all sounds must appear to emanate from the screen. Such cinematic listening experiences undermine theories of film as cohesive illusion by inscribing the “real” (live music) into what is “represented.” Live ensembles conjure up the dramaturgical fantasy space of the operatic orchestra pit, hindering recipients’ “disavowal of the apparatus” and yet increasing the sense of film’s Aristotelian mimetic enactment, rather than its distanced diegetic recounting. This practice invites us to rethink ideas of diegesis and music’s role in creating filmic worlds.