Jeffrey Shaw

Continuous Sound and Image Moments is a hand-drawn, black-and-white film loop with no beginning or end. Conceived as a cinematic expansion of pictorial means, it values the process of making thousands of drawings over the singular image. Shaw and Tjebbe van Tijen made the drawings together ‘in the manner of a cadavre exquis,’ the Surrealist game in which each participant adds to the work in turn, creating an iconographic repartee; the shared botanical, generative style was distinctive to van Tijen. Each image appears for only a few frames, leaving fleeting impressions on the retina that merge over time into ‘an insubstantial yet coherent multiformity.’ Rather than telling a story, the film explores how we perceive rapid sequences of still images, seeking ‘to excite the perceptive process for indeterminate form within the total flux.’ It was later used in expanded cinema events and installations such as Corpocinema and MovieMovie (both 1967). Willem Breuker’s soundtrack, a graphic score for six musicians inspired by the images, was added later.