German
Johannes Kreidler Composer

20:21 Rhythms of History (2021)

movie theater film

duration: 46'

Salome Kammer, voice
Alexandre Babel, percussion
Silke Lange, accordion
Noa Niv, trombone
Sonja Lena Schmid, cello
Ernst Surberg, keyboard
Johannes Kreidler, concepts / music / computer graphics / director
Dejana Sekulic, interior designs

Premiere: 15.-17.10.2021 Donaueschinger Musiktage

 

As is well known, film montage reached artistic maturity through Sergej Eisenstein. And a shot (Einstellung), as Rainer Werner Fassbinder says, is in a double sense not only the set angle of the camera perspective, it also shows the attitude of the author. Putting such shots together, relating them to each other, putting them under time pressure, so to speak, then creates a complex statement.

In music, one is used to the unity of performance. You can cut up a melody, but hardly a cello and not its player, not the present. Performance cannot be heterogeneous at all; in this practice in the here and now there is no suddenness, everything has its organic catching up, breathing; there is only its own time. Film, on the other hand, needs no upbeat; montage is the art of no upbeat, of shocks.
Film is a narrowly defined frame that reveals nothing of the surrounding, and in terms of time, changes of setting follow one another abruptly, between which there may actually have been hours, weeks, a century. Their sequences are possibly reversed, the time cursor jumps continuously, back and "over graves forward". In contrast to the rhythms of a cello played live, the continuum of time is lost in the rhythms given to a cello recording by cuts, replaced by artificial arrangement or perhaps by order or time itself. Film is a time medium in a double sense: it transmits past time in its own time sequence.
"The abnormal movement inherent in the cinematographic image frees time from any concatenation, it allows a direct presentation of time by reversing the relationship of subordination that binds it to normal movement; 'film is the only experience in which time is given to me as perception.'" (Gilles Deleuze)
And this is what I am interested in, in conjunction with music.

Composing music cinematically, staging notes, placing sound wave visualizations, with these I can articulate attitudes to music in general, frame them, comment on them aesthetically and form symbols. In any case, I have long understood composing music to be similar to filming, in other words: there is always something already in front of the lens, there is no blank sheet of music, one includes what is already there in a frame, edits, rebuilds. The Kantian question, "What can I know at all?" also means: What can I compose at all? The state of instruments and digital hardware, the structure of musical notation and software, the Internet archive, the concepts of listening, these are the media of composition that are given or are to be pushed further.
And in the meantime I also work as a filmmaker, which means that I understand film as a reflection medium of music and music as a reflection medium of film.

Time has no speed, it passes absolutely evenly. Music has all the time in the world, from time moment to time area and time period, but it inevitably consumes it. Each cello piece consumes a little more of the cello. The harpsichord has long since been eaten up, almost completely, by the baroque period. The instruments are transformed into music piece by piece until they are used up.

When you watch a film, you are watching the past. It makes present, visualizes the past. Images and sounds appear that were recorded sometime earlier, the people acting are older in the meantime; ultimately every portrait photo, writes Susan Sontag, is a memento mori.

If music is a medium of reflection for film, then music as film can also be, to a special degree, a medium of reflection for temporality, that is, for history. The cut, then duration and rhythm, the fold to be unfolded, the accumulation, the condensation, contraction and dissolution, the fall of time, the shift from the experienced to the remembered - this is what attention and imagination should be directed to here. Sound visualization is a sound archiving. The whole film is a structural reflection on it. And also the attempt at a vision.

The human being is talented with the concept as well as with the cut, with whose force he separates his world from chaos, and one also hears conceptually. Hearing is – in the meantime – deeply interspersed with linguistic knowledge.
The cut in the film is likewise a line break, a microsleep, a dead interval. It already starts with the blink of an eye, a shutter, similar to the 25 frames per second, that illusion on which film movement is based. When are we even aware in "real time" of the required cuts, revisions, remnants, concatenations and omissions – or vice versa, of the illusion of continuity at all?
But the cut can also heal. It is able to untie the Gordian Knot.

In Friedrich Nietzsche's description of the "last man", who – perfected – has left all history behind him, it is mentioned several times that he blinks conspicuously, and for years I wondered what this detail meant. Perhaps this: without further historical caesura, the basic function of perception becomes a self-referential tick, over-motorized and half-blind, it divides where there is nothing left to divide at all. The final rhythm is that of perception itself, and paradoxically, blindness accompanies it. Perception must perceive other. Auto-reflection is essential, but not every brain cell can think itself. The camera cannot film itself, just as the hammer cannot hammer itself. If the handle sits loosely, it needs a second hammer to fix it again and thus make it a hammer; the (camera) view needs other views, the music needs other music, a historical difference, a gap between the pieces of music, night between two days. Just as art does not insert itself into the continuum of time, but intervenes and interrupts it.

In addition, at the time of the film's creation, the Corona virus struck. First a natural disaster, then also one of the struggle for truth, an epidemiological and epistemological crisis. The form and rhythm of information become particularly sensitive factors in times of uncertainty, they unexpectedly become rhythms of history: curves, forecasts, turning points, ends of life.
One does not have to say to the unfortunate moment: Linger on! It already does that on its own. Unhappiness is memorized more potently than happiness – don't linger! In this rather gloomy hole the film took its shape.

This is a motion picture. The work breaks apart more and more into many, many individual concepts. In the course of making it, there was a large pool from which I compiled; the Minusbolero procedure applied to my own material: a constant self-filtering. It could have turned out differently; the work could also be a room installation, with several large screens and live musicians. But here it is presented as a fixed film. In the cinema space, a pause and enclosure, the time window of a rectangular bright spot opens before us, plus sound. The value of the cinema space, free of gloom, is darkness.

 

 

 

Commission of SWR for Donaueschinger Musiktage 2021.

In the foyer of the movie theater of the premiere at Donaueschinger Musiktage 2021 there was also an installation .

 

The cover of Harry Lehmanns book "Musik und Wirklichkeit" is a video still from the film:

Related works:
The series of >Films<
Film 1
Film 2
Film 3

See also: Lecture Music or Media Art?.