Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:18am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Sonic and Visual Excess Session Chair: Polina Dimova | |
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Decluttering In-House Excess: Sonic Excess in Obayashi’s House McGill University “Excess” is a vague term: it signifies something as more than is acceptable or appropriate—a surplus, often without specifying the standards by which this “too muchness” is measured. Singular material elements rarely appear excessive on their own, but repeated elements gradually produce the perception of excess without ever clearly revealing the point which non-excess becomes excess. The theory of cinematic excess finds its footing in 1977 with Kristin Thompson’s “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” shaping subsequent research on the topic (ex. Altman 1989; Williams 1991; Massumi 2021; Brinkema 2014; Koutsourakis 2021). Films, for Thompson, who draws on Roland Barthes (1977), Stephen Heath (1975), and Russian Formalism, are sites of opposing forces: 1) unifying structures that bind the film into a coherent whole, and 2) its material overflow: excess. To clarify, Thompson theorizes excess as the audiovisual elements of film that cannot be fully contained by its unifying structures. I propose using Obayashi's House (1977) to elucidate a critical reading of cinematic excess by showing how “too muchness” can be identified in the musical soundtrack as a patterned stylistic mode rather than as a purely intuitive or functional force. First, I conduct a literature review of cinematic excess to clarify how the term has been employed and to acknowledge its historical vagueness—specifically, how excess is often treated as self-evident rather than methodologically defined. Second, I propose a method for analyzing excess. Third, I apply this method to House and its score to demonstrate how sonic excess operates as a stylistic mode that exceeds functional motivations. My ultimate goal is to render earlier scholarship on excess more accessible and to offer a replicable method for analyzing cinematic excess that can be extended to other dimensions of film. It is time to declutter the theory of cinematic excess.
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