Author: Bruno di Marino
The music video genre is mainly linked to pop, rock and electronic music, and for obvious market reasons. This is a pity, since classical music in instrumental form lends itself to an even freer 'mise-en-images', and has a much higher evocative power, than any song accompanied by lyrics; while the transference of sounds and symbols, aided partly by the mediation of painting, has its roots in the period of the historical avant-garde. At that time experiments by artists such as Richter, Eggeling, and especially Fischinger were based on pure rhythm and the heightening of the dynamism inherent in forms. For almost a century, numerous experimental films and videos have used classical music, even though they never had the same visibility as Walt Disney's film Fantasia, or the same media exposure as modern music videos.
The idea of rendering these passages of Stravinsky and Debussy into images – the two musicians being peculiarly ‘visual' or indeed sometimes visionary – is a revolutionary one. The KML Foundation plans to make it the point of departure for a wider project involving more young artists working with video. With their creativity, the extraordinary passages played by Katia and Marielle Labeque can be made even more vivid, more modern, and more fascinating. For Debussy there have been several precedents in the history of experimental film, such as the movies realized by Germaine Dulac in 1929, and Jean Mitry's Images pour Debussy (1952). In each case, the music conjures up liquid images. In Mitry’s words – "Debussy's crystalline sounds, his glitter and his chords – unlike classical chords that are sculpted in marble – call for the bubbling springs, the reflections and the transparencies of living water.”
Tal Rosner's interpretation of both Stravinsky and Debussy, far from conditioning listeners' imagination, perfectly captures the rhythm and plasticity of the two composers, and refers to the notions of scansion, serial pattern, and sound transformation. By working on urban landscape, on architectural geometries, and processing them through mirror or colorize effects, Rosner creates a digital mutation of figurative images. He dissolves them into an abstract and even more evocative texture, where the piano's sounds and tone- colours can expand and almost glide ad libitum, intercutting effectively to make a counterpoint to the variations, crescendos, and caesurae.
The horizontal scrolling of views from a train reinforces the idea of visual flux, merging elements of technological civilisation (pylons/houses/bridges/cranes) with elements of nature (clouds/trees). Thus music becomes for Rosner a score presiding over a kaleidoscopic architecture of vision, whose fragments can be reconfigured time and again like pieces of a puzzle. At other instances of what we can consider as a single video, even though it accompanies different musical passages, Rosner chooses to show the Labeque sisters themselves in rehearsal, with a mixture of static and moving images: faces, landscapes, fleeting details of hammers hitting the piano strings, visibly beating time. Here is a breaking of barriers between the documentary and the meta-visual, which reveals to us how musical performance and video creation run in parallel, and offers a new reading of the work of these two great composers.
Author
Bruno Di Marino is an essayist, researcher in cinema and video (particularly interested in non-fiction and experimental film and video), documentary filmmaker, teacher, organiser of exhibitions and retrospectives, and director of festivals. In 1993 he founded, and until 2001 directed, the audiovisual archives of the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza.’ Since 2001 he has been consultant for the RaroVideo label.
Translated by Timothy Ades