Issue 7: Summer 2011
'Pure Cinema' @ 22nd Cork French Film Festival
Commissioning a contemporary music score to accompany a silent film can be a contentious issue to the cinema purist. On one hand, it can simply entail the modernising of a tradition which, in itself, reminds us that since their original creation, silent films were always at the mercy of an external force: their accompanying score. On the other, it can be approached as a 'found footage' exercise by exploring alternative dimensions in a work made evident through post-modern reinterpretation. Either way, the process can result in an illuminating and inventive enhancement of the material, or in the corrupting of a film that destroys the intentions of a filmmaker no longer alive to defend his or her work. The 'Pure Cinema' event at the 2011 French Cork Film Festival achieved both results when two musical groups were commissioned to compose scores for the films of Germine Dulac.
Katie Kim - fronted by talented musician Katie Sullivan - created a score for two of Dulac's most renowned works, The Seashell and The Clergyman and L'Invitation au voyage (both 1927). Elegant in their attention to Dulac's work, the compositions were commendably respectful of the source material and added to rather than distracted from the films. Unfortunately, the quality of the soundtrack was undermined by technical disasters in the projection of the films. While understandable practical issues no doubt prevented screening The Seashell and The Clergyman from 16mm as originally intended, there was no excuse to show the DVD they eventually projected in the incorrect aspect ratio, thus distorting the image. What's worse, the final minutes of Dulac's film were interrupted by a notice on the screen stating "Your Laptop Is Low On Battery Power" before the laptop died, bringing the film to a premature end. Sullivan remained positive under the circumstances, announcing that there was "only a minute or two" left in the film and joking "everybody lives happily ever after" but it was difficult not to feel sorry for the musicians, whose hard work for over six weeks ended in this way.
In contrast, the musical contributions from Donal Dineen and Niwel Tsumbu served only to show how vulnerable silent films are to being exploited by people unsympathetic to the source material. For Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque, Disque 957 and Thème et variations (all 1929 and screened on 16mm) the pair conjured up an ill-fitting and self-conscious score which served their own purposes rather than complimenting Dulac's intentions. As the title card at the beginning of Disque 957 proclaims, the filmmaker's motivation was to create a visual impression of listening to the 5th and 6th Preludes by Frederic Chopin. Dineen and Tsumbu's collaboration resulted in an inappropriately funky, up-tempo accompaniment which had no correlation to the film whatsoever, moving beyond abstraction and reducing the images to visually enthralling background noise. Dineen is well-regarded within the Irish music scene as a DJ and radio presenter championing eclectic world music and electronica, and it is worth noting that the majority of the audience seemed to be in attendance because of his involvement. Since the event seemed geared towards a music, rather than cinema, crowd, Dineen and Tsumbu's work was considered to be the highlight of the show, and not its nadir. One enthusiastic woman could be overheard saying that she "didn't expect those images would go with that music". The films as presented were no longer "pure cinema" as Dulac envisioned, but merely a debased element of 21st century multimedia spectacle.
-Christopher O'Neill