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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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:09am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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The Sounds of Silent Film Session Chair: Ryan Nason | |
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Rhythm and Motion: “The Melodious Clowning of Satie” in René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924) as a Blueprint for a Modernist Audio-Visual Aesthetic Cleveland State University Erik Satie, René Clair, and Francis Picabia’s pioneering twenty-minute Entr’acte shown in the intermission of Relâche has received ample scholarly attention. While Douglas W. Gallez (1976), Martin Marks (1997), Robert Orledge (2008), Jonathan Hicks (2017), and Sandra Skurvida (2025) put their emphasis on Satie’s music, Christopher Townsend (2009, 2011, 2021) and Claudia Kappenberg (2009) investigate the film’s visual aesthetic through the lens of contemporary art critics and philosophers (Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze). The missing link is a study that explores rhythm and motion resulting from the interrelationship between Satie’s music and Clair’s moving images. In addition to the existing scholarship, this study takes into consideration the recently found primary sources, including Satie’s holograph score for Entr’acte housed at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and additional footage shot by Clair for Entr’acte, which has been released by the film production company Gaumont on BluRay in a restored version of the short film in 2019. With the premise that Entr’acte is one of the first films, which was truly conceived as a sound film avant la lettre, this presentation explores how Satie and Clair envisioned Entr’acte as a critique against 1920s ambitious French avant-garde cinema. Clair disapproved of such overformal films as Abel Gance’s La roue (1922) with music by Arthur Honegger. He claimed that the only way to overcome this misled trend is by returning to the roots of cinema and by embracing rhythm and motion. Satie and Clair realized this concept in the second half of Entr’acte with a highly ironic chase sequence of a runaway hearse during a funeral. This six-minute sequence with the camera constantly in motion showcases Satie’s extraordinary score. His repetitive, yet elegant and genuinely cinematic music featuring simple, short, and memorable patterns being mirrored in the rhythm of the editing, gestures of the actors, and camera movements embodies a radical renouncement of the romantic tradition. The music is exceptionally effective because it avoids doubling the visuals in the aural realm. It instead promotes an anti-romantic film music, which would only become a viable inspiration for composers in the 1980s and beyond. | |