Silent Films, Live Scores 2015
For this year’s New Sounds Live Silent Films/Live Music series, from Feb. 17-20, 2015, at the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place, we alternate between two special events: First, filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Only Lovers Left Alive), performs world-premiere live soundtracks for four Man Ray short films with a duo version of his instrumental rock band SQÜRL. There’s also the U.S. premiere of Spanish director Pablo Berger’s 2012 Blancanieves (Snow White) with live accompaniment by composer Alfonso Vilallonga and the Wordless Music Orchestra, with special guest Julian Koster (of Neutral Milk Hotel). The programs all begin at 8PM on alternating evenings, and will be recorded live for future broadcast on New Sounds Live. Here are those details:
New Sounds Live Silent Films/Live Music
Winter Garden at Brookfield Place
February 17-20, 2015 all at 8:00 p.m.
Man Ray films, score by SQÜRL - February 17 & 19
Blancanieves (2012), score by Alfonso Vilallonga & Wordless Music Orchestra - February 18 & 20
230 Vesey Street
artsbrookfield.com/new-york
Admission is FREE
Tuesday, February 17 & Thursday, February 19, 2015 at 8:00pm:
Four films by Man Ray, selected by Jim Jarmusch:
Retour a la Raison (1923), Emak Bakia (1926)
Les Mysteres Du Chateau Du De (1929) L'Etoile De Mer (1928)
World-premiere scores composed and performed by SQÜRL
Carter Logan
Jim Jarmusch
The minimalist director Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law, Night on Earth, Broken Flowers, Mystery Train) selected four short films by Man Ray: Retour a la Raison (1923) Emak Bakia (1926) Les Mysteres Du Chateau Du De (1929) L'Etoile De Mer (1928). The live score for these will come from his instrumental rock band SQÜRL in duo form, featuring Jarmusch, and drummer Carter Logan, with big drums and broken guitars, cassette recorders, loops, and feedback. Jarmusch is no stranger to scoring his own films, as he collaborated on the music for Only Lovers Left Alive and 2009’s The Limits Of Control. (SQÜRL originally formed to score the The Limits Of Control.) Here’s “The Taste Of blood” from the soundtrack to Only Lovers Left Alive:
American multimedia artist Man Ray was a photographer, painter, and filmmaker and is associated with and contributed to the Dadaist and Surrealist movements of the 1920’s and '30’s. Man Ray’s early film, Le Retour à la Raison (Return to Reason), scraped together for the last Dadaist event in 1923 (The Evening of the Bearded Heart), contained some cameraless sequences which were created by using the celluloid itself as a canvas. Emak Bakia, Ray's second film, incorporated sequences from his first, intercut with original scenes that err towards Surrealism. These visual experiments, including techniques like double exposure, soft-focus, and "Rayographs," created by arranging objects or pepper on photographic paper and exposing the paper to light, were later co-opted by animators and filmmakers during the 1940s to 1960s.
In L’Étoile de mer (The Sea Star) 1928, he told the story of two lovers from the point of view of an (underwater) starfish. Man Ray’s longest film, Les Mystères du Château de Dé (The Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice) in 1929 followed the visit of two travelers to the Villa Noailles in Hyères—the home of husband and wife Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, the highly significant patrons for Picasso, Cocteau, Dali, and many of the Surrealists.
Wednesday, February 18 & Friday, February 20, 2015 at 8:00pm:
Blancanieves (2012)
Written and Directed by Pablo Berger
Score Composed by Alfonso Vilallonga (U.S. Premiere performance)
Performed by Wordless Music Orchestra with Alfonso Vilallonga
Ryan McAdams, conductor
Alfonso Villalonga, accordion/ukulele/banjo
Julian Koster, musical saw
The live performance of Alfonso Vilallonga's original soundtrack for these Blancanieves screenings features Neutral Milk Hotel’s Julian Koster on musical saw, Vilallonga himself on banjo/accordion/ukulele, and the versatile new-music ensemble Wordless Music Orchestra. Hear an excerpt from the score:
Writer/Director Pablo Berger has a field day with the Brothers Grimm in this silent film treat, where he recasts Snow White as a talented female bullfighter set in southern Spain in the 1920s. The original flamenco-inflected orchestral score for Blancanieves is by Alfonso de Vilallonga, and includes musical saw.
The story goes like this: once upon a time there was a little girl who had never known her mother. She learned the art of her father, a celebrated bullfighter – now paralyzed in a wheelchair, but was hated by her evil social-climbing stepmother with a penchant for S&M. One day she ran away with a troupe of dwarves who travel between cities staging bullfights. They name her Blancanieves, Spanish for Snow White. When one of them is wounded during a fight, she leaps into the ring and distracts the bull, using matador skills she learned from her father. Eventually she, too, becomes a famed matador.
The film swept the 2013 Gaudí awards (known as the Spanish Oscars), winning Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actress, and Best Catalan-Language Film, and Vilallonga’s score won the 2013 Goya Award.
See the trailer:
