The Adventures of Prince Achmed

@garethkvile @rgarciafons @GCHalls thanks: it affirmed my belief that #film and #music are always at their best shared and live
— Svend Brown (@svendbr) March 1, 2015

 Svend Brown is a Vile Arts' favourite. Not only does he programme contemporary classical music that demonstrates a

sensitivity both to its populist potential and intellectual intensity, he engages with the idea of the concert as a performance. His comment on The Adventures of Prince Achmed not only correctly assesses the success of Renaud Garcia-Fons' live soundtrack to this early animation, it reveals his underlying aesthetic, which challenges simplistic ideas about what consist of 'performance'.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the oldest surviving animated feature film (it is just over an hour) and is a 1926 retelling of a tale from the Arabian Nights - with the story of Aladdin thrown in for good measure. While some of the representations of oriental people could be criticised for racism, the animation style, based on shadow puppetry, holds up against contemporary techniques. The story relies on the panels to explore character rather than explanatory text - except in one sequence when director Lotte Reiniger reveals a sophisticated understanding of controlling dramatic tension - and is charming and melodramatic in equal measure.

Achmed's use of the frame will be revisited in this blog - the way that it adapts shadow puppetry and self-consciously shifts perspectives throughout is fascinating and surprisingly advanced for a 1920s' production - but Garcia Fons deserves kudos for his score. 

Most musical adaptations of silent cinema are either perfunctory (Glass' effort for Dracula is a lazy disappointment) or founded in the egotism of the musicians (55Daysof Static ruined Silent Running by bursting out into expansive post-rock every time the camera observed outer-space). Garcia Fons' ensemble, with a mixture of western and eastern instrumentation (the tabla rocked the show),

was delicate and subtle, never merely illustrating the scenes but, equally, refusing to overshadow the animation. A fluid, measure composition, it added romance and humour to a film already full of beauty and inspired images.

The 'liveness' of film is a tough idea, but Brown is saying something about the film as a performance - the way that it brings together an audience, making a community. The live music adds to the theatricality, and the sense of event... and the music itself is deepened by the visuals (a trick used effectively by Godspeed You Black Emperor). Cheers, Sven. 

The Battle for Truth continues

Change/Live/Reflect

Towards the end of Auslander's book on Liveness, he describes how the dominant medium (at the time of publication, it was TV) impacts on the remains of the previous dominant culture (that was theatre, more or less). The minority medium imitates the style of the dominant - in the case of performance, it tried to incorporate bits of video and whatever into the live performance.

A good example of this is that time that Scottish Opera tried to turn An Italian Girl in Algiers into a soap opera. Auslander gets into how MTV was shaping rock culture's obsession with authenticity. Sadly, less than a decade after its publication, Liveness has become a relic: the Internet is now dominant, and TV is trying to copy it (i-player, anyone?). Auslander also missed a trick, citing Eric Clapton as an example of how MTV tried to rescue itself after Milli Vanilli made everyone look stupid.  

Clapton was not a serious artist after about 1977, and MTV's attempt to rebrand by giving him a load of awards was another mistake, part of its descent to abandoning music videos for an endless stream of publicity pieces for artists with more cash than taste, or bad reality shows.

Still, the idea holds: the dominant medium dictates the pace, and sets up plenty of tropes for the minor arts to borrow. In the case of theatre, this has led to a bunch of poor plays about social media, or the occasional invitation by artists that the audience 'leave their phones on, please.'

In criticism, it gets worse. The professional critic worries about the tweets and status updates that challenge their authority - either joining in or churning out press releases to up their numbers (I am talking about myself, yes). Opinion is mistaken for criticism - a situation not helped by criticism's failure to decide decisively on its actual function.

It is generally assumed that criticism is parasitic. The host is the event, the critic feeds on the art and passes the waste onto the public. A symbiotic relationship is just as valid a reading, but lacks the possibility of making a joke about faeces. But allowing the performance to be dominant poses a question: in what ways can criticism ape its form? Is there time for a change in speak?