Silent cinema as you've never seen or heard it before! The collaboration with the Americans of Back To Life allows us to continue along the path begun in 1999 to rediscover the forgotten masterpieces of early cinema. The films restored with the contribution of artificial intelligence can thus be further enriched by new soundtracks, perhaps even in 5.1 surround and edited on DVD - Bluray where the different soundtracks can be selected from the menu as is generally done with the languages, obtaining, thus, an experience of enjoying the work also completely differs based on the chosen soundtrack.
Remusicazioni Film Festival
THE SOUND OF THE SILENT AGE
SINCE 1999 NEW SOUNDTRACKS FOR THE CINEMA OF THE SILENT ERA
competition
The competition remains the central focus of the Rimusicazioni Film Festival.
Let's give voice to silent cinema.
The finalist films of the competition will be screened in theaters in Bolzano.
film concerts
A film concert is an artistic show that is halfway between the screening of a film and a normal concert. The spectator finds himself in the condition of shifting his attention from time to time from the stage to the filmic image. A film concert is not a film screening, it is not a concert, but a new and different artistic installation.
productions
Over the years we have produced various DVDs with multi selectable soundtrack.
Instead, the viewer who selects the language of the dubbing selects a different soundtrack. Each time it does so, it can radically change the experience of watching the film.
Silent Cinema VS New Soundtracks
About thirty years ago, on May 12, 1986, the film Metropolis by Fritz Lang made its reappearance in cinemas. For the occasion, the film underwent various restyling, including colouring, the addition of special effects and captions. But the most substantial of the changes is undoubtedly the replacement of the original music, composed at the time by Gottfried Huppertz, with a new soundtrack in synth-rock style signed by Giorgio Moroder and other pop stars including Freddy Mercury, Bonnie Tyler and Adam Ant. Thomas Elsaesser, in his volume dedicated to Metropolis, defines Moroder's version as "something between a remake and a post-modern appropriation". Here, the idea of post-modern appropriation of silent cinema films can perhaps help us to grasp the meaning of the practice of "cinematographic re-scoring", in its double form of live event and audiovisual project. In recent years an increasing number of composers and musicians is dedicated to a form of entertainment, borrowed from the recent past, which in France is called cineconcert and in Italy with the neologism rimusicazione. As the French term suggests, it was born from the union of two arts, cinema and music, and generally refers to the consolidated practice, in use during the first thirty years of the history of cinema, of accompanying screenings with a soundtrack performed live.
In fact, the films made until the end of the 1920s are defined as silent precisely because, due to known technical limitations, they were born without dialogue. These were compensated for with an "expressive-emphatic" acting and/or with captions that served to clarify the most important narrative junctions of the film.
cinema of those distant years.
Nowadays, silent cinema represents a very important chapter in the history of cinema, an object of interest and research for scholars who are committed to tracing an exact map and elaborating an ever more complete history of the seventh art.
As the interest of scholars has focused on the silent era, festivals, conferences and initiatives have arisen in many countries that deal with historically and critically framing, restoring and re-proposing silent films to the public. For example, in Italy Il Cinema Ritrovato of Bologna and Le Giorni del Cinema Muto of Pordenone carry out an extraordinary work of recovery and dissemination which allows us to enrich and clarify our knowledge of the cinema of those distant years.
In these festivals, the screenings are usually enhanced with the live musical accompaniment of the original scores, but if, as often happens, a score does not exist, then a pianist enters the scene who improvises or a musical formation that interprets the images with new music composed for the occasion. The musicians, generally pianists, called upon to create these accompaniments are excellent professionals specialized in this particular way of playing and know how to improvise (compose instantly?) pleasantly, following the flow of images with a polite style, respecting the presumed musical language in vogue in those times, and therefore keeping the sound commentary within stylistic limits which tend to exclude modernists, radicalisms and various sound extravagances.
These refined sound comments put film enthusiasts and scholars at ease, because they are transparent, harmless, because they do not break the narrative and do not distract attention from the film: the music says, but not too much. We tend to define this sound approach as "philological", where the term implies a style not too distant from what - presumably - a pianist at the time would have played. A modality which, with the aim of not interfering excessively with the original meaning of the film, proposes cinematographic accompanying music drawn from a reassuring historicized dimension, in which relationship it arises with respect to the practice of "musical appropriation" (post-modern) advocated by Thomas Elsaesser and practiced by many composers?
Let's go back to Giorgio Moroder's Metropolis. Although it may appear stylistically distant and controversial in the result it reaches, the musical score is not satisfied with caressing and supporting the images: it scratches them, forces them, interferes with them and illuminates them from a new point of view. By introducing electronic sonorities and decidedly anti-historical methods of musical development, Moroder widens the discourse and short-circuits the meaning of the images. The composer, in the absence of meeting with the director, re-reads his work in retrospect with his eyes and his sensitivity. And, in the absence of a direct comparison with the latter, he rewrites it and recomposes its meaning, one could say arbitrarily.
Among the initiatives that focus their attention on the relationship between cinema and music, Rimusicazioni Film Festival has been working on this for years by applying a very open formula, in order to collect and give visibility to the greatest possible number of creations of new soundtracks for silent films. Here it is believed that, whenever a film has come down to the present day without its original score, its re-scoring necessarily results in an experiment, in an interpretation not authorized by the director and therefore essentially arbitrary. Precisely the circumstance that the director does not express any opinion on the music authorizes us to think that this could also be true for the so-called philological sound commentaries and respectful of the practices of the time. Thus, our festival moves within a space of expressive freedom, to the full advantage of creativity, which we would like absolute. For this reason, the competition does not set stylistic limits to the music, on the contrary, the freedom of the participating authors is total. Everyone will decide whether to comment on the images with music, sounds, noises or something else, whether to adopt a philological or didactic approach rather than an irreverent or modernist one.
THE PRACTICE OF REMUSICATION OF THE SILENT CINEMA REPERTOIRE BETWEEN PHILOLOGY AND FREE CREATIVITY