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TO THE RHYTHM OF MUSIC AMONG THE (FILM) STARS
10/09/2011
It’s always there but often goes unnoticed; it is not talked of much but its presence is fundamental in defining a film’s atmosphere and progression. Music, this great protagonist of cinema, has been a very special guest of these eleven days of the eighth edition of the Venice Days.
This year’s new venue for the Venice Days, the Pagoda’s Open Space, a little open air cinema forum which recaptured that old spirit of the first screenings at the Excelsior hotel, in fact hosted two major live music events: on September 3, the screening of the film Radici by Enzo Gragnaniello, was followed by the Neapolitan author’s performance and on the 9, after the screening of their film Valdagno, Arizona, the Pyoor Collective moved the audience with the evocative sounds of their music, taken from the Album “Native American”.
While there wasn’t the fortune of hearing them play live, Sigur Rós too attracted a vast nocturnal audience with one of their concerts, filmed in its entirety in the documentary Inni.
Italy, US and Iceland: three places far from one another, three completely different sounds, linked, however, by one element in common: a search. A search for archaic, secret melodies, created at the heart of the pulsating lives of communities which have been able to preserve the sounds of their own past. If Sigur Rós bring together the boundless energy and devastating melancholia of their country’s untouched nature, the Pyoor Collective recapture the vitality and the anger of the music of the Navajo, rooted out of their native land, while Gragnaniello ventures into the bowels of the Neapolitan tradition, renewing it and celebrating its potential to move.
But another common passion guided these three groups at the Venice Days, that for images. While having chosen different means, they all chose to attribute their own music to the big screen, giving shape to three documentaries whose stylistic cypher is that of showing the music’s authors in the midst of their own creative exploration; unusual backstage shows, these works show the audience on the one hand the reasoning, the meetings and the inspirations behind certain sounds, and on the other hand their enthusiastic celebration.
The Venice Days hosted another work which stands out for the strong marriage of sound and vision in their Official Selection: Cafè de flore, by Jean-Marc Vallée. Through the music of, incidentally, Sigur Rós, as well as Pink Floyd, Nin and The Cure, Vallée loaded the film’s images with emotional colour, at the same time redefining, through his own stills, the contours of the picture-like images produced by sound.
A virtuous and fertile circle, in sum, a promiscuity of languages that the Venice Days have supported and promoted, lending it an evocative open air space, embraced by the sea, enveloped by the sky and surrounded by the stars who treaded the red carpet of the Venice Days and of this 68th Venice International Film Festival.
Francesco Bonerba
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