Event: Mantler's Visual Music

Mantler's Visual Music

TIFF Lightbox. Wednesday, March 9, 2011.

Although this was also the first night of Canadian Music Week, I decided to take it easy, and just head out though the rainy slush to this special event at TIFF's new Temple of Cinema. A free screening, in co-presentation with The Music Gallery, this was a programme of shorts curated by Chris Cummings. Known as Mantler when he performs on stage, when not singing his sad songs Cummings has had a long affiliation with TIFF, as well as an academic background in film. So it's no surprise that his selection of music-related cinema was quite a distance away from the typical music video.

In fact, the films hewed much closer to the avant-garde, with many showing audacious experimentation with both content and form — several, in fact, were pioneering in their use of direct animation.¹ Starting with a pair of works by Oskar Fischinger, the programme led off with the self-descriptive Motion Painting No. 1 (1947, 11 min.), with hand-painted animation set to Bach's Brandenburg Concerto², and the quicker, explosive Allegretto (1936-1943, 3 min.), which was quite sublime.

That was followed by a trio of films by Len Lye, starting with the bold, punchy Trade Tattoo (1937, 5 min.). Apparently commissioned by the British Post Office, even with the zingy references to Industry! and the Power of Correspondence ("THE RHYTHM OF TRADE IS MAINTAINED BY THE MAILS"), this visually audacious Technicolor riot was probably not what they were expecting. Even now, we don't have a good vocabulary for this sort of nonlinear boldness — we tend to quickly slip to lazy drug jokes and trippy, psychedelic references.

Rhythm (1957, 1 min.), which is an editing exercise in exactly that, juxtaposing the flow of industrial work to tribal beats.

And Free Radicals (1958-79, 4 min.) pushed that further into abstraction, employing designs — suggestive of both lightning and dancing figures — scratched directly into the film stock and cut to Maori drumming.

The experimental works of the NFB's Norman McLaren are well-known in his home country, although I wasn't familiar with either of these selections. Synchromy (1971, 7 min.) was visual cinema in the purest sense, moving the film's soundtrack into the visual area, so you are literally seeing what you are hearing. It sounds like it had prefigured 8-bit chiptunes music by more than thirty years.

Synchromy's frenzy is in direct opposition to the beautiful simplicity of Lines Horizontal (1961, 6 min.). Although there's probably a math paper to be written here on its use of standing wave patterns, the best thing is to just blank out a little and flow with this, like a kid watching hydro wires rise and dip from the back seat of a car:

After that minimalist exercise, Larry Jordan's Gymnopedies (1965, 6 min.) felt like a rococo edifice, the headlong rush back into complexity feeling almost florid after Lines Horizontal's rigourous minimalism. Employing cutout animation with a Victorian surrealistic bent, this felt like Monty Python-era Terry Gilliam rushing headlong towards Fantastic Planet. But under the calming influence of Satie's forever-and-always gorgeous piece, it found its own meditative rhythm.

A departure from most of the rest of the programme — and its longest piece — Warren Sonbert's Friendly Witness (1989, 22 min.) had a different sort of formal audacity. This exercise in montage mixed together home movie clips cut (in the first half) to rock'n'roll songs, the combination creating a sort of set of personal references akin to Chris Marker. The quicker flurry of selections preceding it might have lowered my attention span, but not as much of this stuck with me.³

The screening portion ended with one last blast of trippiness. Cecil Stokes' When the Organ Played ‘Oh Promise Me’ (c.1940s, 3 min.) was apparently made as a tool in the treatment of the insane in an era when Bing Crosby was considered calming, if not therapeutic, featuring a brain-melting visual field created "using crystallized chemicals and polarized light" set to Der Bingle's soothing tones.

And in addition to all of this was a short performance after from Cummings, playing a brief solo set with wurlitzer and Rhythm Ace. Although he was obviously inspired by the films he presented, Cummings' music is certainly less abstract, and he had no lack of thematically-appropriate material, leading off with "Author".

"That's sort of my love letter to the theatre," Cummings observed afterwards. " Now, I'll do my love letter to the cinema. [beat] It's called 'Crying at The Movies'". And that was followed by the new "Husbands", based on the Cassavetes film of the same name — both song and film closely observed and vaguely melancholic.⁴

Listen to a track from this set here.

In a brief Q & A afterward, Cummings talked about his relationship to movie music ("a bit of a lost art") and about having done some film music as a cinema student. Asked about how these experimental films might have influenced his music, he talked about his desire to overcome the plainest sort of narrative: "I'm always trying to find a less linear way of writing a song".

That made for a nice wrap to the evening. Well done all around, it was a thoughtfully-selected programme from Cummings. And as cool as it is that many of these are available on the youtubes, it was really excellent to see these on the big screen, in fine prints tracked down by TIFF. In our over-stuffed information-world, curation matters more than ever.

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¹ That is to say, they were created without the use of a camera — not to be confused with "direct cinema" in the documentary film sense.

² I can't find an embeddable video for either of the Fischinger works, but here are links for Motion Painting No. 1 and Allegretto. I'm not quite sure what's on offer with all the manga ads on this site — and apparently, my adblocker is way less effective for Japanese ads. Who knew?

³ I also couldn't find this one online at all, so I couldn't refresh my memory.

⁴ In Mantler-related news, 2000's debut album Doin' It All is getting a digital reissue, and to celebrate, Mantler + band will be playing the whole thing at a special show next Friday (December 2, 2011) at Holy Oak Café. A one-of-a-kind show that would be well-worth your time.