(still from Andrzej Zulawski's The Third Part of the Night)---
When music scores are mechanically grafted on to what’s on screen in narrative cinema, they tend to represent less an integral part of a piece of art than a distrust of the audience’s ability to respond to an image in a meaningful way. It suggests to the viewer that without the soundtrack mapping the contours of the image, the film would fail in conveying the emotional register it desires.
It's a tendency that haunts the closing event of this year’s Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, in which Michael Nyman and Motion Trio collaborated for a night of exultant, mostly winceworthy music at the Barbican. Titled Films to Write Music To, the event showcased a series of Nyman’s scores along with a new commission made specifically for the festival. Nyman and his orchestra were joined by Polish accordion group Motion Trio, who added plenty of queasy jauntiness to the proceedings. Tonight the compositions tend to follow a popular film score tradition of overblown, tasteless mush. Blind to the possibility of showing a little restraint, these are ever erupting pieces that always seem to be scrabbling to match the exact feeling of each of the scenes being soundtracked.
In the first part of the concert Nyman speeds through a series of extracts without visual accompaniment from some of the films he’s scored, most of them directed by Peter Greenaway. On stage, Nyman plays with his back to the audience, hands looking puppeteered as they move up and down, hammering the same notes hard and fast. The music is characterised by a repetitive restlessness, minimal in that Nyman is prone to repeat a simple phrase throughout each piece, but relentless in each extract's attempt to continually invade each individual feeling of the film being scored, moving between pitches and tempos at a reckless rate. Given no room to breathe and stretch out, these five minute snippets ceaselessly head towards a fist pumping euphoric vibe as the strings inevitably start soaring just beyond the halfway mark. Nyman has the propensity to staple together the music and the image, instead of cutting them both some slack and allowing each form to create its own magic. The one mellow piece that’s played is a welcome respite, prettily discordant with a feeling of aimless wandering that offers a little subtlety that's much more exciting and evocative than the rest that’s offered here.
After the interval, visuals are set to two longer compositions. The first, commissioned to commemorate the opening of the TGV North-European train line, is a real catastrophe. Asked to provide some footage for this evening’s event, Nyman consulted his “archive” and presented some night time grainy footage shot looking out of, ahem, a train. Blown up onto the big screen, this nastily pixellated mess of buildings and lights glaring in the dark was so overpoweringly awful that it rendered any vague potential power of the music redundant.
This was followed by a new commission in which Nyman created a soundtrack to short extracts from twenty Polish films, in what was easily the most successful section of the evening. Scenes were edited in fairly interesting ways to emphasise thematic and scenic links between the movies. The music skittered along nicely and mostly found the right feeling, sound and image at last collaborating together to develop a meaningful rhythm.
It's a tendency that haunts the closing event of this year’s Kinoteka Polish Film Festival, in which Michael Nyman and Motion Trio collaborated for a night of exultant, mostly winceworthy music at the Barbican. Titled Films to Write Music To, the event showcased a series of Nyman’s scores along with a new commission made specifically for the festival. Nyman and his orchestra were joined by Polish accordion group Motion Trio, who added plenty of queasy jauntiness to the proceedings. Tonight the compositions tend to follow a popular film score tradition of overblown, tasteless mush. Blind to the possibility of showing a little restraint, these are ever erupting pieces that always seem to be scrabbling to match the exact feeling of each of the scenes being soundtracked.
In the first part of the concert Nyman speeds through a series of extracts without visual accompaniment from some of the films he’s scored, most of them directed by Peter Greenaway. On stage, Nyman plays with his back to the audience, hands looking puppeteered as they move up and down, hammering the same notes hard and fast. The music is characterised by a repetitive restlessness, minimal in that Nyman is prone to repeat a simple phrase throughout each piece, but relentless in each extract's attempt to continually invade each individual feeling of the film being scored, moving between pitches and tempos at a reckless rate. Given no room to breathe and stretch out, these five minute snippets ceaselessly head towards a fist pumping euphoric vibe as the strings inevitably start soaring just beyond the halfway mark. Nyman has the propensity to staple together the music and the image, instead of cutting them both some slack and allowing each form to create its own magic. The one mellow piece that’s played is a welcome respite, prettily discordant with a feeling of aimless wandering that offers a little subtlety that's much more exciting and evocative than the rest that’s offered here.
After the interval, visuals are set to two longer compositions. The first, commissioned to commemorate the opening of the TGV North-European train line, is a real catastrophe. Asked to provide some footage for this evening’s event, Nyman consulted his “archive” and presented some night time grainy footage shot looking out of, ahem, a train. Blown up onto the big screen, this nastily pixellated mess of buildings and lights glaring in the dark was so overpoweringly awful that it rendered any vague potential power of the music redundant.
This was followed by a new commission in which Nyman created a soundtrack to short extracts from twenty Polish films, in what was easily the most successful section of the evening. Scenes were edited in fairly interesting ways to emphasise thematic and scenic links between the movies. The music skittered along nicely and mostly found the right feeling, sound and image at last collaborating together to develop a meaningful rhythm.
