Subliminal music for a psychoactive 80-year old silent film

my other life

I’m a film devotee. In college, I co-ran a film club for several years, called “Friday Night Movie Guys.” Every Friday night, I showed three films on the screen of a lecture hall, normally reserved for frosh chem, differential equation solutions, and “exciting” guest speakers such as Mr. Singularity futurist himself: Ray Kurzweil (and the inventor of surprisingly good musical keyboards). I went to university at a very strange and mind-destroying institution called Harvey Mudd College. But I digress.

The main benefit of running this club was access to coveted student funds, thus allowing me to watch and rent whatever films I wanted in the name of running a club. The previous organizers had shown relatively mainstream, mostly American films. Those who know me may not be surprised to learn I pushed the screenings in more of a cinephile direction. Off the top of my head, a few that come to mind:

• Nosferatu Night: I screened the original Murnau film, followed by the weird Herzog version. Now what was the 3rd one?

• Kurosawa Night: The Seven Samurai followed by Ran. These two films are longer than most sets of three films.

• Jim Jarmusch: This is how I saw Night on Earth. And damn if Winona Ryder wasn’t badass and beautiful in her scene. (This was also my first accidental exposure to the wonderfully laconic films of Aki Kaurismaki via Jarmusch borrowing some of his Finnish actors).

Surprisingly, I usually did not have a packed house for such films.

I write all this as a way to circuitously explain why I’m currently working on a film score for a groundbreaking but obscure 80-year old short silent film called Meshes of the Afternoon. Oh and..by the way, if you didn’t happen to know from my previous writings, which don’t really have much to do with music—I’m a musician-composer, and I’ve scored several short films that have played at various film festivals, as well as having released several albums and a 7” vinyl last year.

The 13 minute film, which is freely available, as well as judged worthy enough to be included in the Library of Congress, was made by the experimental husband and wife team of Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied. It makes for a powerful and weird watching experience, and is difficult to describe. It’s best watched, rather than discussed. David Lynch is among those who have been influenced by it.

Deren was an avant-garde artist, who seemed far ahead of her time, and a Jewish-Ukrainian immigrant to New York. She was staunchly opposed to the homogenizing nature of the Hollywood film system. She also spent time immersed in ethnographic research and film projects in Bali and Haiti. According to her wikipedia page, “The function of film, Deren believed, was to create an experience.”

They seemed like kindred spirits to me. This futuristic, subconscious-blending, yet coherent silent film, was made around the same time Charle Parker was co-inventing bebop. Somehow, it seemed perfect fodder for my own idiosyncratic blend of analog electronic and acoustic sounds. So that’s what I’m trying to do.

This is simply one short cut, from a fully live take, with minimal editing, which will form part of the larger score. Much work is to be done, but here’s a window into the feeling I’m trying to tap into with my process (to which I owe a debt to Aphex, Miles, and Vangelis, among many others).