by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Those of you with a film studies course behind you will no doubt recall a glorious piece of avant-garde documentary film from the Soviet Union called Man With a Movie Camera. Made in ’29 by Dziga Vertov, it was light years ahead of its time - as it explored almost every aspect of day-to-day life in Russia at the time, it exploded all the rules about filmmaking, squeezed the technology for all it was worth and boasted a daring editing style on par with anything on MTV today.

It was this film that the organizers of the Porto Festival in Portugal had selected when they rang up London’s Jason Swincoe in late 1999. They wanted Swincoe’s band, the Ninja Tune act Cinematic Orchestra, to create a new soundtrack for Vertov’s classic. Having previously scored largely for the movies in your mind, the band was eager to bring their thoughtful blend of neo-classical chamber music, deep jazz and modern turntablism to the silver screen. The results were nothing less than astounding.

While the Cinematics won’t be playing the film and score in their entirety when the hit Montreal’s Jazz Fest this year, they will be mixing choice bits in with older works, including stuff off their powerhouse EP Every Day. The film is meanwhile available on DVD, and well worth it. The Mirror buzzed Swincoe in his L.A. hotel room and chatted about Vertov’s film, the band’s score and the art of updating soundtracks.

Mirror: It strikes me that a fresh, new modern score can reinvigorate an old film, silent or otherwise. I’m thinking of the score Philip Glass did for Dracula and how it brought the film to a whole new level of eeriness, an emotional impact that I don’t think it ever achieved before that.

Jason Swincoe: It’s interesting, we started doing the Man With a Movie Camera project in May of 2000, and last year, myself and the band went to a venue in London, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, to see Michael Nyman doing a version of it.

M: Wow, Michael Nyman!

JS: I went out of curiosity, to see how he’d approached it. One aspect that was similar was how he’d split the film up into six main sections. It was determined by the length of the reels, in a way - that’s how Vertov pieced the film together. Six reels of film, so there are six distinct parts to the documentary film. Nyman had dealt with that, but it seemed to me he’d kept the principle of early silent movies in a cinema, where you’d have a pianist at the side of the stage playing the score. He dealt with it in that way but filled out the sound with a string section. It’s interesting what you say about how a film can be brought to life again and pulled into the 21st century by something a bit more contemporary. That’s what we tried to do, rather than keeping it in the decade it was made. I don’t see the point in that. It was done then and was good enough at the time. It’s nice to bring it forward. An interesting thing about Vertov is, he was a pianist himself, and he loved technology. You can see it in the film, how he loved to push the boundaries, trying to get as many things out of the equipment of that time as he could. It makes sense to do the same with the music, to use as much technology as there is around, because those ideas were very important to his concept. I’ll watch bits of the film and think, wow, this film, regardless of it being black and white, feels at times really contemporary.

A guided tour of the 20th century

M: That struck me about this film - there are certain elements, objects or styles of women’s dress perhaps, that are very time specific. But overall, it seems like a guided tour of daily life in the 20th century. Also, this is a film that manages to be avant-garde - that was his strategy, to discard anything connected to the narrative and artifice of theatre and literature and see what could be done with film that could only be done in that medium - but at the same time doesn’t lose an ounce of accessibility. Naturally, I’m not a Soviet Russian from the ’20s, so I’m seeing it as someone raised on all the culture that came after that, and came to many of the same conclusions.

JS: The things that hooked me on the film after a few viewings were the rhythm and the pace of it. How could music be put to that without it being a slapstick piano piece? The film’s just so rhythmic, so advanced in its editing techniques and superimposition and so on. He laid out a very specific structure, and that was the inroad, to me, to explore those things and then get more into detail in terms of harmony and so on. We started with the track "Man With a Movie Camera," which was a very important part of the film, in terms of rhythm, and in terms of man against machinery, industrialization at that time. The section before that was "Evolution," which is birth, marriage, divorce and death - each section is very powerful. I could talk about the film for days, really. But as we’ve been touring the film, we’ve studied it in depth and found out more and more about it, how many layers there are to it, in all kinds of ways, socially, politically and so on.

M: What’s important to me about it, politically, is not so much what it says but what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t club you over the head with Das Kapital, and it’s pretty devoid of militarism. In other words, it’s very much at odds with our Western preconceptions of what Soviet art and propaganda was. Apparently, the Stalinists were not the least bit happy with this film.

JS: No, they weren’t. It was banned, I think. I can kind of understand why. He was panning right across the scope, from tramps waking up in the morning -

M: Yeah, that’s something I doubt the Soviets wanted the world to see, that they had a homeless problem too.

JS: Yeah, and from that across to people lying on the beach half-naked, and then into some quite humorous sections, with women concerned with their weight and all the devices to tone stomachs and bums. I think it’s fantastic that he actually got away with it. I’m sure at the time it was pretty outrageous. You can look at it now and think, that’s what’s going on now, still. I live in London, and those scenes of nudity to tramps and everything in between - it’s still there. That’s another aspect that makes it seem so contemporary, that he’s not so specific about his definitions.

Five days

M: In a nutshell, how did the scoring process work?

JS: Initially, it was pretty hectic and crazy. Got a copy of the film, spent a couple of weeks watching it and then spent four days in a rehearsal studio with a TV and VCR, rewinding and hitting play. We worked out all the key points for changes in the music, mapped out the six main sections. Then, I had loads of samples on my sampler, and I’d go, ‘What about this for that section? Does this work? No, scrap it, try something else.’ At the end of the fourth day, we had the idea pretty much mapped out. On the fifth day, we were performing it. So we didn’t have much time to stop and think about it - which I think is a good thing, to just throw yourself in there.

M: I gotta say, the soundtrack stands fine on its own, without the visuals. That’s the proof in the pudding of an outstanding soundtrack.

JS: I think Bernard Herrmann was a master at that. For example, Taxi Driver or all his work with Hitchcock - some beautiful music, that. There are two aspects to that, whether the music stands on its own, and whether the music connects and doesn’t overpower the film, displacing it in a way.

M: I guess scoring an actual film is sort of what you’ve been building up to with Cinematic Orchestra.

JS: It kind of is, but it’s not the only thing. That’s one of the great things, the last two months we’ve been touring the film in theatres and cinemas, seated venues, and the age range is from 20- to 60-year-olds, which we normally never get. Mostly, when we do a club gig, we just get twentysomethings. And that is a beautiful thing, because music is for everybody. It’s a universal language that should be a uniting experience for everybody.

With Gotan Project at Metropolis on Saturday, July 5, 9pm, $37.50

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