Finding Sounds To Translate Images

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

By the time of his death in 1987, Raymond Rohauer had built a profitable distribution empire of classic films by navigating the treacherous shoals of copyright ownership with such fearless entrepreneurial zeal that his more academically minded film collector rival and historian, William K. Everson, dubbed Rohauer “King of the Film Freebooters.”

Among the many cinematic treasures that Rohauer acquired, administered, and tagged with his own personalized head credit (regardless of their origin), were a group of brilliant experimental short films undertaken by such artists as Man Ray, Hans Richter, Fernand Leger, and others keen to court the 20th century’s newest and most tantalizing medium of expression.

In 1999, the custodians of Rohauer’s archival legacy, the Douris Corporation, and Ohio’s Wexner Center for the Arts commissioned guitarists Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip to compose and perform new musical scores for a program of Rohauer’s experimental gems. Mr. Verlaine had gained moderate fame as the front man of New York’s unclassifiable punk-era rock group, Television. Mr. Rip is an accomplished sideman and producer. The stunningly spare, melodic, and enchanting series of scores that the two men introduced while seated side by side at the foot of movie screen at St. Ann’s Church in October of 1999 was performed solely on electric guitars and was an absolutely rapturous live experience.

Highlighting both Rohauer’s proprietary sangfroid and the essential playfulness at the heart of many of the films, Messrs. Veraline and Rip began each film’s individual score with the same breezy eight-bar theme as the Rohauer Collection credit spooled past. During the films themselves, Mr. Verlaine employed his characteristic spidery single-note solo runs and repeated figures, while Mr. Rip chugged out clean, brittle, low notes and brought the tempo to an appropriate gallop for frenetic sequences.

The evening’s combination of an ephemeral, impermanent live performance and the exotic (and for film history buffs, familiar) images from such canonical avant-garde films as Hans Richter’s “Rhythmus 21” and Man Ray’s “L’Etolie De Mer” was an unforgettable and unique mating of creative energies. A DVD release combining the Rohauer shorts and Messers. Verlaine and Rip’s scores seemed like a foregone conclusion at the time, but it has taken eight years for “Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip: Music for Experimental Films,” a new DVD from Kino International, to materialize. Like Kino’s previous two-volume Rohauer collection, “Avant Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and ’30s” (which was far less courageously scored and, since some of the film titles here are duplicated, the likely culprit for the long delay in releasing the Verlaine and Rip disc), “Music for Experimental Film” benefits from a superior and sensitive transfer. Confined to the small screen the Rohauer Shorts’ varied physical condition adds the archival equivalent of a rustic quality and may actually improve the viewing experience.

And then there’s the music. Watching “Music for Experimental Film” returned my heart to the same place it occupied in my mouth for the entirety of the St. Ann’s show nearly a decade ago. Culled mostly from concert performances in Spain and Portugal, the scores retain the same extraordinary balance of edge-of the-bed premeditated noodling and emotionalism that they had in live performance. The accompaniment for Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1929 soft focus visual fugue “Brumes D’Automne” is an especially lilting musical mosaic that comes in twangy and clucking cascades one moment, and in looping, oozing, and echoing two-note figures the next. For “The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra,” Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey’s decidedly Germanic satire of American assembly-line filmmaking, Msesrs. Verlaine and Rip use pick scratches and string noises to lend cacophonous voices to the title character’s Kafkaesque tormentors.

When the film spirals into a montage of documentary footage of Los Angeles circa 1929 (photographed by future William Wyler, John Ford, and Orson Welles’s cinematographer, Gregg Toland, credited only as “Gregg”), the two guitars lope in a sort of chrome-plated Appalachian reel punctuated by Mr. Verlaine’s signature quaking sustained accents.

The sole frustration with Kino’s marvelous new release is its relatively no-frills packaging and brief running time. “Music for Experimental Film” features only seven titles (the live show was considerably longer and tried my patience for not one moment) and clocks in at a lean 78 minutes. In fairness, it should be noted that the Verlaine and Rip collection is less than half the retail price of the previous Rohauer compilations. The other upside of the relative brevity is that it leaves room for additional volumes to follow this remarkable, essential, and endlessly watchable DVD.


The New York Sun

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