ACHT BRÜCKEN: NICA artists set silent films to music

ACHT BRÜCKEN: NICA artists set silent films to music

Four commissioned compositions for silent films were created between the ACHT BRÜCKEN Festival, Stadtgarten Köln and NICA artist development under the motto ‘Light!’: pianist Marlies Debacker interprets ‘Ballet Mécanique’ in a quintet. Saxophonist Jonas Engel dresses abysses with Asta Nielsen in the leading role in new sounds. Saxophonist Fabian Dudek sets Andy Warhol’s motionless experimental film ‘Empire’ to music, while percussionist Thomas Sauerborn sheds new light on everyday life in Kiev, Kharkiv and Odessa in 1929 with ‘Man with a Movie Camera’.

In the 95 years since its release, Dsiga Wertow’s ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ has lost none of its significance: As an experiment in a universal cinema language, the silent film, which manages entirely without intertitles, has already received various musical interpretations. The film, whose structure - as if according to musical parameters - finds its rhythm, literally sucks viewers into life in Kiev, Kharkiv and Odessa in 1929. Thomas Sauerborn’s composition intensifies this pull, inspired by the symbiosis of film and camera techniques on the one hand and the realism of the images on the other.

Sauerborn, together with two companions from the formation Das Ende Der Liebe, brings two female trombonists into this ensemble and thus opens up the space between the breathing wind instruments, the manipulated sounds of the Nintendo Gameboy and live sampling. Together they bring the everyday life and rhythm of 1929 into the present day - juxtaposing it with the life and sounds of the 21st century.

Is this even a film? If you want to answer the question in the affirmative, it is a film that has been stripped of most of the attributes that generally distinguish a moving image from a photograph. A fixed camera shot captures the top of the Empire State Building. Andy Warhol exposed over six hours of celluloid in this way, completely without sound, from the onset of dusk until deep into the night. According to the instructions of the New York avant-garde icon, the material is to be projected in 16 instead of 24 frames per second, resulting in a performance time of over 8 hours. There is a philosophical dimension to slowing down a still image.

The film will be shown in full length at Stadtgarten Köln. Saxophonist and composer Fabian Dudek and his quintet will play their own soundtrack for 50 minutes. It is the phase of transition from day to night, from light to dark, a very gradual yet drastic change that is barely perceptible to the temporal resolution of the eye. Is the contrast accentuated musically? Is the still image acoustically set in motion or painted over in sound colours? Dudek wants to approach the project with his own new compositional technique.

Jonas Engel’s older work ‘What the Wild flowers Witnessed’ evokes memories of the song ‘Moaner’ by Underworld from the 1997 Batman soundtrack and drives the listener forward. The trio put together especially for this occasion uses the juxtaposition of instruments and voice in a very similar way - but on a more equal footing. Musical spaces here range from the very intimate to the dramatic. It allows plenty of room for interpretation - in keeping with Urban Gad’s ‘Abyss’. The silent film from 1910 also juxtaposes large, free spaces with small, very regimented ones. The protagonist, a tutor, is courted by a pastor’s son in Denmark at the time the film was made, when the circus is in town during a summer visit to her parents’ holiday home. The plot opens up abysses between freedom, dependence, confinement and emotion. Whether these are ultimately overcome remains in the eye of the beholder. Engel’s compositions utilise abysses and give listeners the opportunity to find their footing or lose themselves even more.

And ‘Ballet mécanique?’ This French silent film, made 15 years later, is the first Dada film! Post-cubist and without any plot, we see all kinds of everyday objects such as pots or crockery, but abstracted in such a way that they no longer seem familiar, but rather appear as their form. A rhythmic interplay of objects, to which Marlies Debacker will create a non-pictorial background, in which composed, random and improvised sound actions overlap and invite us to discover our own connections in a multifaceted web of sound-image and sound-sound relationships. A work somewhere between musique concrète, musique concrète instrumentale, drones and pulsating textures.

Overview of all events

12.05. | 20:00
ACHT BRÜCKEN: Thomas Sauerborn | Man with a Movie Camera

14.05. | 18:00
ACHT BRÜCKEN: Fabian Dudek | Empire

15.05. | 18:00
ACHT BRÜCKEN: Marlies Debacker | Ballet Mécanique & Jonas Engel | Afgrunden

These concerts are organised in cooperation with ACHT BRÜCKEN | Musik für Köln, the European Centre for Jazz and Contemporary Music Stadtgarten Köln and NICA artist development.