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Chance Encounters: Serendipity and the Use of Music in the Films of Jean Cocteau and Harry Smith

This article focuses on notions of chance as part of the creative process, in the context of exploring the relationship between film image and music. It discusses the collaboration between Jean Cocteau and composer George Auric by drawing on their correspondence, material that is not available in English. More specifically, the article looks at Jean Cocteau's method of ‘accidental synchronisation’ and Harry Smith's notion of ‘automatic synchronisation’, that are distinctive creative strategies and aesthetic approaches utilizing chance factors, in the production of film music. These methods can be viewed in terms of a longer history of experiments with sound, images and colour as precursors of light shows and multi-media events of the 1960s and other more contemporary media forms. Cocteau and Smith's experiments open up important questions about the processes by which audiences perceive and make sense of music in relation to film.