It had been a while sense I had "heard" a good silent film so a program on German Futurist cinema of the 1920s at Roulette intrigued me. Cinema scholar Kurt Ralske discovered some experimental film footage based on early commercial German silent films. This discovery led him to hypothesize that the directors of many of the early, and highly successful, German films were not always satisfied with the artistic limitations placed on commercial films. So, people such as Eugen Schufftan and F.W. Murnau experimented with much of the material to take it far beyond what the public had seen in the films. Their work has ties to the Futurist movement that first developed in Italy. Mr. Raske and his co-presenter Miriam Atkin also posited connections between Futurism and fascism.
Although there were some major technical glitches in the presentation (the Apple software Keynote would apparently not cooperate), the entire evening was quite fascinating. Seeing the clips from various films as modified into works of art that reflected expressionism, dadaism, futurism and other avant-garde movements was simply dazzling. What might have been better would have been if the corresponding clips from commercial films (which I believe are still available) could have been shown along side the modified versions.
I was somewhat surprised by the choices Mr. Ralske made for music to accompany the clips shown. Although they were taken from recordings originally made during the period (Kurt Weill, Beethoven, and Russolo), I did not get much connection between the music and the films. Film music from the time does exist and I think if Mr. Ralske had spent more time thinking about the music, the viewing of the clips would have been even more satisfying. Both Mr. Rallske and Ms. Atkin entered into the performance themselves in different ways. Ms. Aitkin projected a dadaesque doodling exercise while discussing the notion of noise and fascism via a computer processed narration that added reverberation and some distortion to it. Mr. Ralske himself accompanied a clip from Der Tod des Faust with a flugelhorn who sound was modified by computer processing and also by the use of such extended techniques as key clicks and breathing into the valve with the sound of the breathing amplified by a microphone. This performance actually to my mind at least complemented the film clip far better than the recorded examples used.
What commercial artists do artistically in their "off the clock" time has always fascinated me. The view of German futurist cinema offered this evening certainly satisfied part of that fascination.
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