Abstract

During the early 1960s American avant-garde jazz and cinema gained ascendancy in many of the same urban centres but their coterminous development has been under-recognized by jazz and film scholars alike. Despite the fact that numerous filmmakers have represented or incorporated elements of improvised jazz in their work, leaving enduring traces of influence and fruitful collaboration, a gap remains in the comparative literature. Reasons for this lack of interdisciplinary crossover may include a difference of signification between image and sound, and the perceived opposition between the open, performative spontaneity of jazz and the closed, mediated film. Inter-cutting cultural history with formal, stylistic, textual and comparative analysis, I attempt to resolve these issues by opening a "dialogue" between two leading architects of the postwar avantgarde: jazz saxophonist John Coltrane (1927-1967) and filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933-2003), focusing on work they produced between 1957 and 1967. Some of the questions to be addressed are: How do social and cultural forces shape artistic forms? How does the improvising artist navigate between harmony and chaos? What is the relationship between improvisation and composition? How are Brakhage's films and Coltrane's music similar, and what do these similarities tell us about their social, political and cultural contexts?