Output details

Late September. Composition for Film. Premiered at Cambridge Film Festival, 18th-20th September, 2011. Further screenings at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2012); British Tour (2012). DVD only (Drake Avenues Pictures). URL (p. 22 in online .pdf) and hard copy evidence date of dissemination.

This film, the second in a trilogy, uses only 30 camera set-ups, and actors improvise live on set. I played much of the piano music live, in my role in the film –either as tableau-like set pieces, such as a puppet play, or as semi-coincidental alignments in the Cage/Cunningham tradition. For example, a Schubert Impromptu being ‘practised’ (halting, repetitive, tentative) in an adjacent room during an intimate scene prompts an unusual mood and sense of timing from the actors, despite my having been unaware of the content of the scene I was accompanying. This approach has few precedents as a research collaboration between composer and film maker. The closet may be Sergio Leone’s procedure in Once Upon a Time in America (1984), which was to play Morricone’s score on set for the actors to act to, like an opera. This film takes this procedure further by filming the action, sound and incidental music together live, with no post-sync. The placement of the post-production musical score is modelled on Tarkovsky and Bresson, who used music mainly as a chorus between scenes rather than as an emotional prop. Deconstructed elements of Liszt’s 12th Transcendental Study Chasses Neige feature prominently, becoming increasingly abstract and desolate until reduced to almost nothing in the doomed boat sequence near the end [01:14:56]. In this scene the music seems to hang almost motionlessly in the air, heavily impregnated by the sounds of the dawn chorus. The originality of this film lies partly in the sensual power of its amalgamation of live recorded sound with music. Main collaborator: Jon Sanders (film director).