Strobe cut

The strobe cut (strobe section) is one of the American pop art - multimedia artist Andy Warhol invented film technique, which he in some of his early experimental films used.

With strobe cut , the picture and sound are cut during the recording and not mixed afterwards, as the sound is recorded directly on the film strip ( light sound ). The simultaneous change creates a brief incidence of light and a "dry" sound, both of which are clearly noticeable during the film screening.

Film critic Gene Youngblood gave the best description of the effects of this technique to date in the Los Angeles Free Press on January 16, 1968:

"The scene is interrupted in order to remind [the viewer] that the whole thing is ultimately just a film, recorded by a camera that can be switched on and off at any time and that allows cinematographic life at the push of a button At the same time, the strobe cut gives the sequences an additional thematic power by punctuating and accentuating the scene - in a similar way to how the optical drive and the camera panning can intensify traditional dramatic effects by selecting the right moment at the right time bring visual coordinates into the picture. " (quoted from: Enno Patalas, Andy Warhol and his films, Munich 1971)

The technique was first used in Warhol's film Bufferin, about a reading by the poet Gerard Malanga (1966), who also worked as an assistant in Warhol's Factory ; later examples are I, A Man and **** by Warhol from 1967 and Trash (1970) by Paul Morrissey . In terms of film history, the strobe cut can be compared with the jump cuts by Jean-Luc Godard used at the same time .