There are many contenders for my favourite David Bowie lyric, but there is one standout. It comes from the 1977 album Low, the first in Mr Bowie’s esteemed Berlin Trilogy. Some of my other favourite Bowie lyrics also cluster around this mid-1970s period. For instance, Low’s second track “Breaking Glass” features one of the most jarring putdowns in popular music:

You’re such a wonderful person
But you’ve got problems
Oh-oh-oh-oh
I’ll never touch you

I think what I appreciate here this is the measured quality of the first two lines, followed by the emotional wailing and proclamation of the second two. We’ve all known at least one of these charismatic, dysfunctional, irresistible people. Some of us specialise in inviting these people in to our lives as intimate partners. The hysterical delivery of Oh-oh-oh-oh; I’ll never touch you reads ironically, as a joke on the speaker. We believe that not only has there been a lot of touching, but that the touching will continue indefinitely. Mr Bowie may be trying to convince himself, but he isn’t convincing us.

Suuure you won’t, Bowie.

Then there’s a line from two years and two albums earlier; a world away in Mr Bowie’s biography and discography from the avant-garde synthesiser experimentalism and “Krautrock” instrumental austerity of the Berlin years. Living and working in the States, Bowie made the “plastic soul” album Young Americans (1975). Here too we find Mr Bowie in an excoriating mood, but this time the personal is political. The record’s title track lambasts the wasteful naivety of a dewy newlywed couple:

Do you remember, your President Nixon
Do you remember, the bills you have to pay
Or even yesterday?

In Young Americans Mr Bowie’s ambivalence towards America finds full voice via the sublime discord between form and content: here one of America’s native musical genres, soul, provides the soundscape for trenchant critique by a “white limey” hailing from the land of the colonial overlords. Again Mr Bowie relishes the irony and hypocrisy. He is capable of being inside and outside of the culture, of critiquing and perpetuating it. This reserves him a place in a pantheon whose only other residents might be Bob Dylan and Madonna.

But my very favourite Bowie lyric seems much more innocuous at first blush than those above. It comes from Low’s track 4, “Sound and Vision”:

Don’t you wonder sometimes
‘Bout sound and vision?

While I can relate to the human drama of “Breaking Glass” and the urgent frustration at The Superpower’s lack of historical memory articulated in Young Americans, it is the contemplative problem-posing of “Sound and Vision” that makes me feel closest to Mr Bowie. Whenever I hear this line I feel moved to answer in interior monologue: you know what David? Yes. Yes I do. I wonder about sound and vision all the time. Every day. Thank you for writing a song about that. What are your thoughts on the subject? As a film critic I have a preoccupation with sound and vision and the relations between the two. It’s nice to think that this is something that Mr Bowie and I share.

“Sound and Vision” seems to be a song about Mr Bowie’s creative process. He sings about being in a room, devoid of external stimulus, where:

I will sit right down
Waiting for the gift of sound and vision

Crucially, he doesn’t wait for “the gift of sound”, or a figurative “vision of sound”, as we might expect of a musician, but specifically “the gift of sound and vision”. Throughout the song the two come bundled together; they are inextricably linked. If this is a song about how David Bowie makes art, we can infer that visuality is no addendum to musicality for Mr Bowie, but rather is at the very core of his creativity.

Understanding the link between sound and vision is key to unlocking the show currently on display at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image [ACMI] in Melbourne, David Bowie is. ACMI is devoted to the history and aesthetics of the moving image—most often its dominant strands of narrative filmmaking and television—and so might seem a stretch as the venue for a show documenting the career of a popular musician through lyric sheets, photographs, stage sets, music videos, filmed performances, costumes, and assorted ephemera. Originating at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, then traveling to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Philharmonie de Paris and—following its ACMI stay—the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, the show’s others stops have been at more obviously compatible venues.

As a film critic I have a preoccupation with sound and vision and the relations between the two. It’s nice to think that this is something that Mr Bowie and I share.

Yet it works well to have David Bowie is installed at a venue whose remit seems to want to exclude it on a technicality. It sharpens up the provocation in the show’s title more so than at the contemporary art, design, and music institutions it has and will visit. “Who is David Bowie? Isn’t he an artist of the moving image as much as he is an artist of other media?” it seems to prod.

Mr Bowie came of age in a post-World War II London, where any remaining boundaries between the artforms were eroding even further as consumer culture took off and modernism gave way to postmodernism. He attended a technical secondary school, but one with a focus on the arts and design. Leaving school at 16 to join bands, he was a multi-instrumentalist working across seemingly incompatible musical genres. He integrated abstruse performance elements and collaborated with photographers, fashion designers, filmmakers, and visual artists. Interdisciplinarity characterised Mr Bowie’s formal education, the cultural milieu he graduated in to, and featured in his work from the earliest stages of his career. All of these elements coalesced in his first hit.

Mr Bowie owed his early success at least in part to the inspiration of a visionary moving image work. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) begat Bowie’s single “Space Oddity”, which was released five days before the launch of Apollo 11 in 1969. Moving images would regularly provide inspiration for Mr Bowie’s music, and also his self-presentation and stage performances. Once again riffing on Kubrick, the modern-futurist gang attire of the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange (1971) were an inspiration for the costumes of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), while Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) offered inspiration for the sets of the Diamond Dogs stage show, itself a concept album for a musical of George Orwell’s 1984.

Mr Bowie and cinema were in a feedback loop adding to and inspiring one another, with the moving image work of other artists taking inspiration from Mr Bowie as much as Mr Bowie took inspiration from the movies. It is impossible to imagine Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) without David Bowie in the eponymous role, while the impetus for Roeg to bring Walter Tevis’s novel to the screen seems firmly rooted in Ziggy Stardust mythos. Speaking of “The Nazz”, the pop-culture phenomenon of the Ziggy Stardust tour provided rich material for D.A. Pennebaker’s iconic concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars the Motion Picture (1973). Mr Bowie’s performance in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth was mind-expanding for a generation of children who knew him first as baby-stealing Goblin King Jareth, and pants-expanding for those same individuals when their post-pubescent selves caught up with the film years later and couldn’t get past Jareth/Bowie’s obscenely prominent manhood.

He integrated abstruse performance elements and collaborated with photographers, fashion designers, filmmakers, and visual artists. Interdisciplinarity characterised Mr Bowie’s formal education, the cultural milieu he graduated in to, and featured in his work from the earliest stages of his career.

In these films Mr Bowie is the main ingredient, but in many others he has been used as an aromatic to add zest to cinema. In Julian Schnabel’s 1996 Basquiat biopic Mr Bowie proves one of the most memorable elements of the picture, playing a consummate Andy Warhol in a small part. It should go without saying that Mr Bowie’s turn as visionary late 19^th and early 20^th century inventor Nicola Tesla is the best thing in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), and arguably Nolan’s entire filmography for that matter. And who could forget his cameo playing David Bowie as the referee of the “walk-off” in Ben Stiller’s Zoolander (2001)? Here’s hoping for a return appearance in next year’s long-awaited sequel.

But perhaps the standout Bowie contribution to other people’s pictures is in David Lynch’s underrated feature film prequel to his pop-phenomenon TV series, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. He plays FBI Special Agent Philip Jeffries, who has long been missing after disappearing from an undercover assignment in South America. He turns up out of nowhere at the Bureau’s Philadelphia office in a drapey 80s-does-40s suit and loud shirt, points menacingly at Kyle MacLachlan, rambles incoherently, screams, and disappears again. Much to the enjoyment of Peaks fans the recent Blu-Ray release included deleted scenes (it was to be a bigger part) of Bowie/Jeffries being zapped to other locations, where he would scream in different hallways, leaving a stencil of scorch marks against the wall. This footage alone warranted the purchase price.

Yet Mr Bowie doesn’t need to appear physically in a film to make his ineffable presence felt. So many films (433 according to IMDB) have been elevated through the use of his music as a soundtrack. Two instances spring to mind in particular. In Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004; a maligned masterpiece) Mr Bowie’s music figures both diegetically—in the form of Seu Jorge’s ship’s mate acoustic Portuguese covers—and non-diegetically in the soring Life on Mars introduction to Zissou’s world, and the bittersweet Queen Bitch end credits roll call. Lars von Trier meanwhile opted to conclude both films in his unfinished “USA: Land of Opportunities” trilogy with the same Bowie song. I’ve heard it called heavy handed, but for mine Dogville’s (2003) credits of Young Americans over Dorothea Lange’s iconic dust bowl photos is an arresting full stop.

Mr Bowie is not merely an exotic ingredient to be added to the work of other filmmakers, though. He has considerable credentials as an arranger of his own moving image works. Mr Bowie co-directed the ground-breaking video for Ashes to Ashes (1980, with David Mallet), a DADA screen-print come to life. Mr Bowie’s hand-drawn storyboards feature in the ACMI exhibition. The video for Let’s Dance (1983, also with Mallet) could be considered what Jane Mills calls a “sojourner film”: a contribution to a national cinema by a visiting international filmmaker. Here Mr Bowie’s playing in an outback pub provides a soundtrack for potent images of the two Australias; a young Aboriginal couple imaginatively try on life in the white man’s world. It’s a canonical contribution to Australian visual culture that sits neatly alongside the work of other sojourners to Australia like Werner Herzog (Where the Green Ants Dream 1984) and Ted Kotcheff (Wake in Fright 1971). Meanwhile the videos produced for Mr Bowie’s triumphant 2013 comeback album The Next Day have even more the feeling of discreet short films with their high production values and starry collaborators, including Tilda Swinton, Marion Cotillard, and Gary Oldman.

But all of this highly considered work of Mr Bowie’s might yet fail to generate the same wattage as those moving image moments when Bowie is simply documented mid-performance. Think Ziggy doing Starman on Top of the Pops, Young Americans on Dick Cavet, or any number of strung-out interviews and other televisual rarities. In this category special mention has to go to what endures as one of the greatest cultural oddities of all time: Bowie singing Little Drummer Boy/Peace On Earth in duet with Bing Crosby on the old crooner’s televised Christmas special in 1977. Crosby died a month later, quite possibly of acute professional satisfaction.

Whatever the corner of Mr Bowie’s contribution to culture, the ACMI show seeks to shine light there. “Special Displays” examine Bowie as musician, stage performer, writer, and actor. The cumulative effect, however, should be to make these categories seem reductive and untenable, as the artist himself does. Whatever David Bowie is, it sits at the juncture of sound and vision, where the two become fused and indistinguishable.

David Bowie is is on display at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image until 01 November 2015.