BluEsForCE
Metropolis

BluEsForCE - Metropolis (live 17.04.2007)

Or "We Lived an Incredible Story Together"

Once upon a time, there was silent cinema. Once upon a time, there was jazz. Once upon a time, there was an artistic contamination that, with the success of sound films, was almost completely lost... until today.

For a few years now, there have been specific cultural settings (festivals, reviews...) where the rescoring of silent films is proposed: to put it simply, while the silent film is projected, someone plays a live soundtrack (either improvised or precomposed) hidden behind the screen. So far, nothing too different from the customs of the early years of cinema, those seminal years when the film was just a brief moment amidst a composite show (the nickelodeon, the cabaret) with comedians, musicians, dancers, and clowns of all kinds.

Today, there are the machines (as Elio e le Storie Tese say in "La bella canzone di una volta"), multimedia, the mixture of communication, new languages, and visual arts, video installations, and other crooked cultural sectors between genius and pretentiousness, innovation and charlatanism. The live musical accompaniment of silent cinema sits at the crossroads between the uniqueness of the theatrical event (live music) and technically reproducible artistic work (the film component). The importance of attending such a show can be explained in these terms: first of all, the necessity to recover silent cinema as a cultural root of the 20th century, secondly, the importance of properly enjoying this cinema (on analog or digital support and with music already synchronized to the video source, one perceives the weaknesses compared to sound films and commits an injustice to the way the work was conceived - as a vision accompanied by live music), and, third but not less important, one enjoys in the most optimal way a true renaissance of a film genre forgotten too soon and now put back into question, actualized with new suggestions given by a live soundtrack.

BluEsForCE is an open collective of musicians from Pavia which, in recent months, has proposed at SpazioMusica a series titled Cinestesia: five classics from the early 20th-century expressionist and fantastic filmography (Murnau, Lang, Méliès, Wiene, Julian) projected and completely rescored for one evening a month in the famous and welcoming Pavia venue. I was very fortunate to attend three of these five new soundtracks, and all three pleasantly impressed me with the infinity of musical cues condensed and expanded in the live technique of bluEsForCE: free-jazz, electronics, noise, blues, psychedelia, and rock alternate, giving the hallucinated ghosts that move on the screen new, surreal, and absurd sensations.

Among the films seen "Metropolis" is surely my favorite, not only for the great fame of one of the greatest masters of cinema but also for the innocence and naivety with which the plot is developed and the themes are treated, and for the mastery of the actors. The choices of the musicians, certainly less ingratiating than those of Moroder in his reinterpretation of "Metropolis", are striking and never didactic. At certain moments they follow the plot, the situations, the psychology of the film, at other times they contrast the film sequences giving the film entirely new atmospheres. Without being banal and without boring, the guys never give in to easy rhythmic synchronization (not very simple in truth, but this is a long discussion) nor to technicality for its own sake, despite being experts of their instruments and skillful handlers of their musical background.

To conclude this report and help readers better understand what I'm talking about, there's nothing better than an example: in the scene where the workers rebel and start the hysterical and confused march, the music becomes increasingly rhythmic - we are on decidedly rock-blues sounds - then when the popular agitation turns into chaos and destruction, the guitarist starts the execution of the guitar solo from the Pink Floyd song "Another Brick in the Wall II". The citation is truly remarkable because it questions the original value of the film by inserting that scene into a cultural short-circuit that involves the rock culture - and not only - of the 70s and 80s. Let me explain better why I find this combination so brilliant. The original song is from the album "The Wall" of 1979; the song talks about revolution, about kids freeing themselves from school and what it represents for them (repression, impositions...). In the film "The Wall" (1982) director Alan Parker emphasizes even more this significance by setting the scene in a school, with students first repressed, sentenced to lethal tortures, then free, who escape, run through the corridors, destroy the building and everything it contains, including the teachers who are burned along with the desks in a large bonfire. Thanks to the ideal time bridge created by the guitarist at the moment of execution, it is instantaneous, in the viewer's mind, to place Lang's film on a common cultural continuum with "The Wall", where the sequences are no longer valuable only for the decades in which they were shot - the 20s, the 80s - but for what they represent. Regardless of filmmaking techniques and the era of the films, the musical choice at that moment constitutes a link between two different cultures and by updating them, it makes us discover that they are not so different: the workers are rebelling against oppression, in their own way following their ideal of freedom by engaging in the most unrestrained and irrational act of destruction, just like the students do in "The Wall".

The last appointment with Cinesthesia will be at SpazioMusica in Pavia on June 5, 2007: on this occasion, various shorts by the visionary and illusionist genius Méliès will be projected, and I warmly invite you to participate because you have no idea how stimulating and dazzling it is to attend a show where silent film thanks to the added musical value returns to being current.

WEB REFERENCES

bluEsForCE
bluEsForCE myspace
SpazioMusica
Cinesthesia