Open-air Cinema Season

 

This Wednesday (August 31) at 7.30pm, the twelve-day Open-Air Cinema Season kicks off on the rooftop of Broadway Cinematheque. Last year, the series held a successful debut by inviting jazz musician Xia Jia and his piano trio to play for Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. This year, they team up with Goethe Institut to screen three silent classics to celebrate the pinnacle of 1920s’ German Expressionist filmmaking.

 

The list includes Fritz Lang’s restored 1925/26 sci-fi epic Metropolis, Walther Ruttmann’s 1927 avant-garde film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Faust: A German Folk Legend (1926). The films will be screened in a total of six events alongside live soundtracks performed by local musicians FM3, Shanshui Trio, and Dawanggang.

 

 

7.30-8.30pm Berlin: Symphony of a Great City + FM3

 

7.30-10pm Metropolis (restored version) + Shanshui Trio

 

7.30-9pm Faust: A German Folk Legend + Dawanggang

 

7.30-8.30pm Berlin: Symphony of a Great City + FM3

 

7.30-10pm Metropolis (restored version) + Shanshui Trio

 

7.30-9pm Faust: A German Folk Legend + Dawanggang

 

 

 

Live soundtrack has been a part of cinema since the very beginning. The beauty of silent films was, by no surprise, driven by technological limits at the time, as filmmakers were forced to tell stories with motion pictures and exaggerated body movements rather than dialogues. By doing this, they’ve established an aesthetic system that no modern films can parallel.

 

Live soundtracks, on the other hand, experienced an even earlier start, and Thomas Edison was involved in this great invention, again. In 1894, a year before the Lumière brothers screened their Exiting the Factory (considered to be the world’s first-ever motion picture) in Paris, William K.L. Dickson (an employee of Edison) took 4 seconds of continuous shots of Edison’s assistant Fred Otto sneezing. A year later, Edison and Dickson recorded a sneezing sound to play alongside the motion pictures.

 

More than a hundred years later, musicians in Beijing make another effort to redeem Edison’s trick while to restore the glories of these classics. We look back on the films, introduce the musicians, and find out how they use music to endow the lives of silence with a new soul.

 

 

 

The original soundtrack was composed by Edmund Meisel. The film puts together a montage of Berlin life, showing the inhabitants, the architecture, and the landscapes of the German capital. Ruttmann didn’t write a conventional script with clear narratives, instead he only jotted down desired atmosphere and visual sketches. From the very start, the film was shot in an orchestral structure, with distinctive divisions of the arrival in the city, the awakening in the morning, noon break, afternoon rush, and evening leisure.

 

 

 

FM3 is an experimental duo consisted of Zhang Jian and Christiaan Virant, and best known for their ‘Buddha Machine’ - a device plays meditative sound loops. Zhang Jian is also a curator of the event.

 

‘I first saw this film at a club in Berlin. I felt it was alright, honestly it didn’t do that much for me, but my mind has always been recalling those shots of the old streets and subway stations. Berlin has been FM3’s habitat for years and we have a lot of friends there. We have deep affections for the city.’

 

 

 

 

Considered the origin of modern science fiction cinema, Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, tells the story of an upper-class man who ventures underground to the world of the workers and eventually causes a self-destructive rebellion. The film inspired numerous cult and popular classics including Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and George Lucas’s Star Wars. In fact, Metropolis suffered from an unfair ‘castration’ as distributors at Paramount cut Lang’s original piece into a 120-minute version supposedly more ‘suitable for American audiences’.

 

The shorter version has been circulated around the world until July 1 2008, when film experts in Berlin claimed to have found the missing prints in Argentina. Premiered in February 2010, the restored version of Metropolis generated new hype around the world. Earlier this year, it was screened at the 14^th Shanghai International Film Festival, now it is Beijing’s turn to live in the future.

 

 

 

 

Electronic label Shanshui Records was founded in 2002 by local 8-bit stalwart Sulumi (aka Sun Dawei) who started his career with barely more equipment than a humble Game Boy. It’s now become an independent gathering of Beijing’s electronic music community. Dead J (aka Shao Yanpeng) specialises in minimalist sound whereas ME:MO (aka Zhai Ruixin) creates ambient sound with his MacBook and electric guitar.

 

‘Before taking this job, I’d only seen Shigeyuki Hayashi’s anime film of the same name. It’s good that we have been given Metropolis because we wanted to see it for a long, long time, especially with the restored prints. It was probably the earliest film dealing with the issue of technology, and it has some theatrical elements that we are very interested in. Although all three of us have composed soundtracks for either theatres or films, this is a brand new challenge. I’m really looking forward to it.’

 

The last film made by FW Murnau before he moved to Hollywood in 1926. This adaption of the Faust legend not only vividly portrays the original in which the devil bets an archangel to corrupt one good man, but also creates the medieval settings with great studio craftsmanship alongside beautifully handled black-and-white cinematography. However, it turned out to be a commercial failure at the time of general release and only half of the production cost was recovered at the box office.

Dawanggang play the soundtrack for their video project Manas, Ax Marks, Beijing, 2009

Fronted by Song Yuzhe, experimental folk group Dawanggang create their unique sound using the eight-string banjo, acoustic guitar, lute, samples of ethnic songs from China’s remote regions, horse-head violin, Peking opera, and percussion. Besides Song, its notable members include Tato Ramirez and Hugjiltu (member of Ajinai and formerly Hanggai).

 

 ‘I saw Faust years ago, but I didn’t finish it. The only impression I have right now is of Faust flying alongside the demon (Mephistopheles). In Dawanggang, we deal with angels, demons, belief and redemption – all these subjects exist in both the East and the West and can be understood across cultures. The fundamental ideas are the same, it’s only the vehicles that carry them that are different. Zhang Jian, who also curates this event, asked us to play for Faust because he thought I was very religious, but actually I wanted Metropolis because I don’t consider myself a part of city life – being an outsider might help as you get a better picture.’ Song Yuzhe, Dawanggang