Music for experimental film

I missed this excellent-looking DVD release from Kino when it appeared late last year, but no harm in drawing attention to it now.

Music for Experimental Film is a collection of avant garde film classics from the 1920s, with music from former Television guitarist and front man Tom Verlaine plus producer/guitarist Johnny Rip. Originally a live show, the DVD features the original films with the music accompaniment for the most played live from a selection of the concerts.

The films featured are:

L’Étoile de Mer (France 1928 12 mins Man Ray)

The Fall of the House of Usher (USA 1928 13 mins James S. Watson & Melville Webber)

The Life and Death of 9413 A Hollywood Extra (USA 928 11 mins Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey)

Emak-Bakia (France 1926 13 mins Man Ray)

Rhythmus 21 (Germany 1921 3 mins Hans Richter)

Brumes d’Automne (France 1929 12 mins Dimitri Kirsanoff)

Ballet Mécanique (France 1924 10 mins Fernand Léger)

To judge from the extracts Kino have provided on the YouTube promo (Emak-Bakia, Rhythmus 21 and Ballet Mécanique) the marriage of delicate post-punk guitar and the visual purity of the films (all the better for the occasional scratches and blemishes earned through age) works particularly well. An apposite and haunting combination.

2008 Man with a Movie Camera

1929 and 2008 Man with a Movie Camera, from http://dziga.perrybard.net

You may remember the posts on video artist Perry Bard’s remarkable project in ‘database cinema’ to create a modern version of Dziga Vertov’s avant garde documentary classic, Man with a Movie Camera, by inviting anyone interested to upload modern equivalent shots to those in the original. You can find all about the ongoing project on Bard’s website, at http://dziga.perrybard.net, but she got in touch to correct an earlier post about the project with this information:

There was an initial deadline which may have led to some confusion however the project is open and ongoing.The reason for the deadline is that people tend to like the excitement of doing things at the zero hour and we wanted as much material as we could get for the launch in Manchester October 11. It continued screening there for two weeks, then screened in Norwich during the Aurora Festival, in Leeds during the Leeds Film Festival. There are links to photos of these events on the site.The site now contains a full length version of the remake which plays as a split screen with the original. We don’t have the server capacity to keep updating the remake but with each screening event it works through a daily download meaning that the film is different each time it screens as more than one person has uploaded entire scenes and shots. The possibilities are infinite. Please participate by logging on to http://dziga.perrybard.net.

There’s also a two-minute trailer available, and the full-length split-screen film (in its current version) is available from Google Video.

21st Century Vertov

You may remember the report of a few months ago about video artist Perry Bard’s idea to recreate Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera with uploaded contributions from volunteers around the world.

Man with a Movie Camera, scene 10, 1928 and 2007 versions, from http://dziga.perrybard.net

The initial deadline for this was 15 September, with the planned new, participatory version of the film being screened on Big Screen Manchester. However, as the project site demonstrates, the uploading continues, with people offering their modern video equivalents of scenes from Vertov’s original (which can be seen on her site in its entirety or scene by scene). You can view each of the sequences, original and remake, though not the new version in its entirety. I haven’t found evidence that it been screened anywhere as yet (does anyone know?), but the site is an extraordinary and thought-provoking work just by itself. Do explore.

Pordenone diary - day two

You could always go to the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, not see any films at all, and still have a marvellous and rewarding time. Some, it would appear, do just that. The weather is gorgeous, the restaurants inviting, every street is strewn with the chairs of pavement cafés, and much negotiating over the higher and lower politics of film archives goes on. It is the place where alliances are made, projects are hatched, and deals are done.

The Bioscope, however, rose with the lark (should they have such in Italy) on day two and headed for the Verdi. At Pordenone, screenings start at 9.00am in the main cinema and run til around 1.00pm, then resume 2.30pm, stop again around 6.00pm, then after supper it’s back for the final long haul from 8.30pm to midnight or so. There’s a second, smaller theatre, used for repeat showings and video screenings, the Ridotto. Had you seen everything at the Verdi on the Sunday, you would have seen seventeen titles. Many come with intertitles other than English, so earphone translation is provided. I have a stubborn belief that if a film is well-made enough, not knowing the language of the titles is not a problem - the pictures alone will suffice. This doesn’t entirely work, but I shunned the headphones, and just about got by.

First up was a selection of American shorts on social interest themes from the forthcoming Treasures from the American Film Archives III DVD. Regrettably, I missed The Black Hand (1906), the first Mafia-themed film and The Cost of Carelessness (1913), an educational film with a scene of children watching an educational film (OK, not everyone’s idea of a thrill, but I’d have been intrigued to see it). So, we kicked off with The Hazards of Helen: Episode 13 - The Escape on the Fast Frieght (1915). Not an obvious choice for a selection of films on social themes, but it was argued that Helen’s (Helen Holmes) position as a railroad telegraph operator assumed by her co-workers to be too feeble to do anything made an interesting social comment on the many women office workers of the time. Because, of course, Helen heroically fought villains across the top of the carriages of a speeding train, before returning to her job where no one was any the wiser about her. It’s not always realised that many of the early serials were not cliff-hangers, but rounded off the story neatly at the end of each episode, before resuming much the same narrative with the succeeding episode. Bud’s Recruit (1918) was a two-reel recruiting drama, where a group of neighbourhood kids form themselves into a ramshackle troop, led by all-American Bud, but it is his effete, bespectacled elder brother who by accident ends up joining the army - and of course discovering that it has made him into a true man. So a bit resistible in theme, but well-made - the director was King Vidor. Lastly in this set there was Labor’s Reward (1925), the one surviving reel of five from a dramatised history of unionism produced by the American Federation of Labor. It put particular emphasis on the exploitation of women workers, and begged audiences to buy only from shops which advertised union-made products. Quite fascinating, and a highly-polished production too.

The Cameraman’s Revenge, from Wikipedia

Pause for breath, then down go the lights for the first of the Ladislaw Starewitch strand. The reason for this seemes to have been a fine touring exhibition of artefacts and photographs of Starewitch’s work which was on display, but the films themselves were a mish-mash of old restorations. We saw Mest’ Kinematograficheskogo Operatora (The Cameraman’s Revenge) (1911), Prekrasaia Lukanida (The Beautiful Lucanid) (1910) and Rozhdestvo Obitatelei (The Insects’ Christmas) (1911), all products of Starewitch’s mindboggling idea to make stop-frame animation films using models of grasshoppers, stag beetles and such like. The Insects’ Christmas was a special delight, Santa Claus climbing down off a Christmas Tree to wake some insects out of hibernation and to treat them to their own festivities.

Pordenone Film Fair

I missed the German film Rivalen (1923) as I had to go to my own crucial pavement café negotiation (the fruits of which you’ll have to wait until January 2009 to see), then to the Pordenone book fair, a fascinating mix of sturdy academic volumes on improbable themes in a multiplicity of languages, and posters, photographs and tattered memorablia for the cinema of the childhood of many of the older festival goers - but such is Pordenone.

The afternoon kicked off with Entr’acte (1924), first off in the René Clair retrospective, with musical accompaniment of Erik Satie’s score by two pianists, Barbara Rizzi and Antonio Nimis. What more is there to say about one of the great jeu d’esprit of avant garde cinema, originally a filmed interlude shown between the two acts of the Dadaist Francis Picabia’s notorious ballet Relâche? The central action is a funeral procession, with the mourners initially lollopping along behind in mock-serious manner, before having to speed up to a manic rush as the hearse (pulled by a camel, naturally) gets faster and faster. A promo-reel for the festival was projected on the outside of the Verdi at night, which included this magical sequence, like so:

Teatro Verdi at night, showing promotional video with scene from L’Entr’acte

Another strand was The Other Weimar. This initially puzzling title introduced the German cinema of the 1920s that we seldom see. Thanks to the studies of Kracauer and Eisner, much of the studies of German cinema at this time has focussed on Expressionism and the fevered productions whose themes seemed to anticipate the nightmares of Nazism. This strand showed the work of the directors who did not get round to making Caligari or Metropolis - those who tended to make the films that people actually went to see.

Wege Zu Kraft und Schönheit (The Way to Strength and Beauty) (1924-25) was a surprise inclusion, being a health, dance and sports documentary, albeit a popular one at the time - probably on account of its liberal displays of nudity. It was an example of the Ufa studio’s documentaries, or Kulturfilme, and most entertainingly had the festival-goers squirming in their seats as its theme of the need for us to get up off our backsides and start walking seemed all too relevant. Though it was a bit long and repetitive, it was made with mocking wit and some style, with plenty to fascinate fans of dance (including Mary Wigman and Tamara Karsavina) and sport (Babe Ruth, Helen Wills, Charley Paddock). And the keen-eyed would have spotted Leni Riefenstahl in her first film, no doubt picking up ideas for Olympia twelve years away, as a maid in a Roman bath sequence.

I cannot now remember what crucial meeting it can have been that led me to miss Fatty Arbuckle in The Cook (1918) and Max Davidson in the immortal Pass the Gravy (1928), but I hope it was really important.

In the evening, Jean Vigo’s A Propos de Nice (1930). We had been promised Michael Nyman playing his own piano score, but he was unwell, and was replaced by one of the Pordenone regulars, John Sweeney - who was magnificent. The films at Pordenone are accompanied by a small team of pianists, generally hidden from view beneath the stage, with a monitor showing them the action and headphones translating the titles. This year we had Neil Brand, Gabriel Thibaudeau, Günther Buchwald, John Sweeney, Stephen Horne, Donald Sosin, Phil Carli and Antonio Coppola. High praise to them all. A Propos de Nice is surprisingly amateurish in places (they didn’t know much about focus), but its cumulative vision of the human madness on display in Nice confirmed its greatness.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Film Archive, the evening’s feature film was Csak Egy Kislány Van a Világon (Only One Girl in the World) (1930), the first Hungarian sound film, though most of it was silent with sonorised score. This was the tale of two war veterans who love the same woman. She falls for the livelier, he falls for another woman when he travels to the city, his friend brings them together again, culminating in a sentimental rendition of the title song. It was a simple yet curiously appealing piece with the quality of a folk tale and a structure in movements that seemed to cry out for its expression as a nineteenth-century symphony. The heroine was played by the 18-year-old Márta Eggerth, now aged ninety-five, who remakably was not able to be at the screening because she is still working (as a teacher of singing). But David Robinson, the festival director, called her on the phone afterwards, and we were treated to the extraordinary experience of listening to this lively woman who sounded as spirited and lively as she had been in 1930, while she experienced the oddness of having her telephone conversation warmly applauded by an invisible audience.

And so to bed.

Clonic Mutations

Just time to let you know about Clonic Mutations, another silent film event taking place at Tate Modern as part of its Dali & Film strand, on Friday 20 July. Here’s the blurb:

Clonic Mutations features the world premiere of live new music scores created for a range of experimental films made between 1904 and 1952 with strong ties to surrealism. Composed for twelve musicians and clockwork toys by Sergio López Figueroa, a Spanish composer and specialist in silent film, the scores examine new contextual relationships between music, historical experimental film and art. The screening will feature the newly restored version of Un Chien andalou by Filmoteca Española.

Programme duration approx 60′

The Strength and Agility of Insects, F. Percy Smith, 1911, 3′58, DVD

A Phantasy, Norman McLaren, 1952, 7′15, 16mm

El Hotel eléctrico, Segundo de Chomón, 1904, 4′, digiBeta

Tusalava, Len Lye, 1929, 9′, 35mm

L’Étoile de mer, Man Ray, 1928, 18′, 35mm

Un Chien Andalou, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929, 17′, 35mm

Full details from the Tate Modern site.

Worldwide montage

Now here’s an extraordinary thing. Video artist Perry Bard is planning a remake of Dziga Vertov’s classic avant garde documentary Man with a Movie Camera, and is inviting the world to join in.

Her plan is to use the web to archive, sequence and deliver submissions for a remake of the 1929 film, which will then be exhibited on the Big Screen Manchester (a BBC initiative to bring big screen pictures to city squares) UK on 11 October 2007, with more public venues visited throughout the UK through 2008.

The project website, http://dziga.perrybard.net, has a scene index with every shot of Vertov’s film recorded in thumbnails and logged in seconds and number of frames. Would-be Vertov’s of today can upload their footage (or still images, or even text), which does not have to match the original shot but should come close to it in length - it’s the rhythmic patterning that counts. Presumably it’s meant to be one shot contributed per person.

Goodness what the results will be like (or how she will select what’s sent, or even how many different potential versions might emerge), but it’s an amazing idea, and certainly has something of the spirit of Vertov’s radical work about it. Here’s the artist’s explanation of how her work connects with that of Vertov:

Vertov’s 1929 film Man With A Movie Camera records the progression of one full day synthesizing footage shot in Moscow, Riga, and Kiev. The film begins with titles that declare it “an experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events without the aid of intertitles, without the aid of a scenario, without the aid of theater.” It is often described as an urban documentary yet the subject of the film is also the film itself – from the role of the cameraman to that of the editor to its projection in a theatre and the response of the audience. It is a film within a film made with a range of inventive effects – dissolves, split screen, slow motion, freeze frame – all of which are now embedded in digital editing software … When the work streams your contribution becomes part of a worldwide montage, in Vertov’s terms the “decoding of life as it is”.

The project site also has the the entire film to view (via Google Video). Uploading starts in August.

Whatever next?

Borderline

www.bfi.org.uk

Those good people at the British Film Institute have just released a DVD of Borderline (1930). This little-known British avant garde silent (now’s there’s an unusual combination of words) was made by the POOL collective of intellectuals, including Kenneth Macpherson (the film’s director), Winifred Bryher, the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and Robert Herring, who were also behind the influential film journal Close-up. But what is most interesting to us now about Borderline is that it stars Paul Robeson, who had just moved to Britain and would later star in several British films in the 1930s. The story revolves around an inter-racial love triangle, made up Robeson’s wife Eslanda, Gavin Arthur and H.D., but it is experimental method attempting to denote states of mind which is so distinctive. As Michael Brooke says in Sight and Sound:

Much of the film is invested with an often inexplicable tension, with regular explosions into rapidly cut torrents of images that reach a frenzy during the more emotionally charged scenes. But it also has quiter, lyrical moments, mostly invoving Robeson, shot from below against Swiss skies and lit as though sculpted in bronze. Whether the film ultimately ‘works’ depends on one’s individual perception, but it’s certainly a unique historical oddity.

Which is sort of how I remember it from a viewing many years ago now. The BFI release has a score by Courtney Pine, background documentaries on Macpherson and co., and booklet.

Borderline also turns up on a four-disc Robeson set from Criterion, released in America. Paul Robeson: Portraits of the Artist features Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul (1924), Borderline (which uses the BFI print and Courtney Pine score), The Emperor Jones (1933), Sanders of the River (1935), Jericho (1937), my great favourite among his films The Proud Valley (1940), and Native Land (1942). There are also clips from Big Fella, King Solomon’s Mines and Song of Freedom.