Sounding Pictures: Live Scores to Short Silent Films, asks the question: what happens when we look at a silent film collectively and collaboratively, responding with an alternative live and improvised score and text? How does this influence the narrative of the film?
Over three days, a series of contemporary, short silent films by 12 filmmakers – some of which had original scores – become the provocation for 14 musicians. In many instances, these musicians encounter the films for the first time, in front of a live audience.
THE ATRIUM
Gevlerkte
A pinscreen-animated chicken dances across the screen, projected in the atrium of The Centre for the Less Good Idea. Screened to a Jean-Philippe Rameau composition performed live by the pianist Mareli Stolp, Diek Grobler’s short film comes alive in front of the crowd.
Accompanied by the light, sprightly keys of Stolp, there is a playful logic and a flow that’s easy to follow. It ends, and begins once more. Played a second time, now with a live, improvisational score by Stolp, vocalist Pertunia Msani and percussionist Micca Manganye, the film takes on a new tone. Suddenly, there is risk, a vigorous and impassioned interpretation of each movement, every gesture and changing frame as it plays out before us.
It is here, in the collective viewing of, and live, improvisational response to the film, that the essence of Sounding Pictures can found — an experimental and open-hearted process that lends new meaning and novel interpretations to that which is being presented.
CREDITS
FILMMAKER | Diek Grobler
COMPOSER | Jean-Philippe Rameau
MUSICIANS | Mareli Stolp, Pertunia Msani & Micca Manganye
Her Sleep Was Everything
Words scroll across pages like poetry, prose, and fragmented thought. Accompanied by the incidental and free-spirited composition of Mareli Stolp and Pertunia Msani, William Kentridge’s short film, Her Sleep Was Everything, puts forward poetic, aphoristic phrases that disappear as quickly as they emerge on the page.
Here, the act of viewing and reading is supplemented by the performance and the music in the room. “What can wake us from inside this rock?” The question, newly urgent, is posed by the fresh trill of keys and an enduring vocal lament. So it goes. Each word and phrase on the page takes on a new colour, a different interpretation.
Rather than seeking answers, the fresh engagement of live, responsive performance with this pre-existing film generates new questions and new ways of seeing alike.
CREDITS
FILMMAKER | William Kentridge
EDITOR | Žana Marović
MUSICIANS | Mareli Stolp & Pertunia Msani
THE CENTRE
Obscure White Messenger
“Can you remember what happened?”
“I don’t remember what happened. But yes, I did stab him right through.”
Obscure White Messenger is perhaps one of the best-known video works by the South African painter and filmmaker Penny Siopis. In it, Siopis makes use of home-movie footage from the 1950s and 1960s overlaid with interview transcripts to focus on the life and inner world of Dimitrios Tsafendas, the man who assassinated South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd — the architect of apartheid — in 1966.
Meeting this collage-like and dream-like visual narrative are a group of musicians and an orator who, eyes trained on the film playing out in front of a live audience, are tasked with responding to it, musically, linguistically, and improvisationally. The result is a rich reading of a layered and complex work, that allows for audiences to be invited or perhaps lulled into a new narrative, as well as be struck by the incidental moments – distorted guitar strings troubling the mercurial movements of an octopus, for example.
But there is also a deepening of the work that emerges through this process of live interpretation. Billy Langa as Orator is at times relatable, other times deliberately not so as he interprets, echoes, re-localises and fictionalises in Setswana, the interview transcripts we read on screen. Ultimately, a new work emerges — a collaborative re-reading of history and of narrative process by Siopis, performers, and audience members alike.
CREDITS
FILMMAKER | Penny Siopis
ORATOR | Billy Langa
MUSICIANS | AusTebza, Aragorn Eloff, Arnaud van Vliet & Reggie Teys
Ingqumbo
After being invited to share a short, silent film for The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s Sounding Pictures: Lives Scores to Short, Silent Films programme, filmmaker Milisuthando Bongela-Davis teamed up with editor Hankyeol Lee to produce Ingqumbo.
In Bongela-Davis’ words: “Ingqumbo is a meditation on severance and engagement, indignation and sulking, encounter and desire in interracial friendships.” Making use of archival footage and collage-like direction, the film plays out in a dream-like narrative sequence, with soft, grainy footage overlaid and disrupted by text – handwritten notes, drawings and prose take the form of title cards and narrative guides alike.
In the room is a team of musicians led by DAPHNE who, along with Sanele Ngubane, crafted a responsive score for the film. In this sense, Ingqumbo is one of the outliers of Sounding Pictures in that some of the musicians had already seen the film prior to the performance and arrived with an idea, albeit a loosely held one, of the score they would be performing.
Together, word and image, music and text, work to both enhance and trouble one another’s interpretation, momentum, and perspective. The result is a collection of images, impulses, emotions and sounds in process, made all the more impactful through their embodiment in the room.
CREDITS
FILMMAKER & PRODUCER | Milisuthando Bongela-Davis
EDITOR | Hankyeol Lee
COMPOSER | DAPHNE
MUSICIANS | Reggie Teys, DAPHNE, Sanele Ngubane, Micca Manganye & Stompie Selibe
Archive courtesy of National Film, Video and Sound Archives of South Africa and Roentgenfilm. I
Fugitive Words
A new film in progress by William Kentridge, Fugitive Words merges the artist’s signature stop-frame animated charcoal drawings with his penchant for merging language and gesture on the page.
The film plays twice – first with a composition by Ludwig van Beethoven, and then with a live score, composed and performed in the moment by a group of musicians and a live orator in the room. The first iteration is received as intended — music compliments the image and vice versa. It is in the second iteration that things begin to change.
While music still accompanies and compliments the moving image — the scratching of the cymbal echoing the sound of pencil on paper — it frequently challenges it, too. An explosion in the inner-city is mute, and goes by unremarked upon, while a slowly growing tree triggers a sonic crescendo.
Similarly, the spoken word of Billy Langa throughout adds new narrative layers to the images we might have thought we knew, and understood. It is both a troubling of the film’s intended meaning, as well as an expansion of the narrative — a collaborative and generative act of viewing, reading, and responding to the moving image.
CREDITS
FILMMAKER | William Kentridge
ORATOR | Billy Langa
COMPOSER | Ludwig van Beethoven
MUSICIANS | Reggie Teys, DAPHNE, Micca Manganye, Stompie Selibe & Pertunia Msani
Aisa Tanaf
Victor Gama’s Aisa Tanaf is an ongoing multimedia composition inspired by the concept of 'the suspended man' a reflection on the incorporeal being by Ibn Sina, one of the leading philosophers of the medieval Hellenistic Islamic tradition. In Sounding Pictures: Live Scores to Short Silent Films, Gama offers up the film for total reinterpretation through live music and performance.
The landscapes of Aisa Tanaf are speculative and otherworldly. Here, Aragorn Eloff’s unique engagement with a modular synthesiser, using algorithmic and gestural composition, as well as the organic musicality of the body, provides a shimmering soundscape. On top of this rests the intuitive and responsive interventions of Micca Manganye, AusTebza, Daniel Stompie Selibe, and Pertunia Msani — an ensemble of percussion, vocals, bass and more, conducted by Manganye. Prose-like narration by Billy Langa serves to localise the narrative, while perceptive and subtle sound manipulation by The Centre’s Head of Sound, Zain Vally, amplifies their collective efforts.
There is a uniquely generative process in Sounding Pictures. The act of deep listening, and of collective, responsive viewing, is what allows for this live re-reading of a filmic narrative, or archival material. What happens in the gap between the filmmaker’s intention and the audience’s interpretation, and how is our collective reading implicit in this? The answer, as always, is found in the making.
As musicians and audience members alike make their way through Gama’s scenes — wading in the ebb and flow of the ocean at the shoreline, taking in the flourish of a dense forest — place, meaning and narrative are always co-authored, never restricted to a single set of possibilities or interpretations. As is the case with all of the works presented in Sounding Pictures, this collective approach is through a dramaturgy of sound.
CREDITS
FILMMAKER | Victor Gama
ORATOR | Billy Langa
MUSICIANS | Aragorn Eloff, Pertunia Msani, Micca Manganye, Stompie Selibe & AusTebza
An argument against an ordinary life
A film about migration, mobility, and contemporary conditions of precarity, Naomi van Niekerk’s An argument against an ordinary life introduces her unique stop-motion sand and scratch animation technique to the process of live scoring as part of Sounding Pictures.
As we follow a single character, bags and passport and an endless stream of administrative documents in tow, we access the emotional landscape and interiority of the film through its live accompanying score. Composed by Van Niekerk’s long-time collaborator Arnauld van Vliet, the score is interpreted and performed live by Van Vliet, Micca Manganye, Stompie Selibe and Pertunia Msani.
Precarity is an enduring theme, and this is developed and held by the performers throughout. As is an exquisite tension and later, as we tumble into and race through Van Niekerk’s scratch animations on 35mm film, a discordant and distorted set of chords from Van Vliet echoes a kind of entropy. Throughout, percussion is a central driver and way of guiding us through the film, narratively.
What might appear at first as a frame-by-frame accompaniment is ultimately a subtle exercise in collectively viewing and responding to the moving image, musically, and subsequently changing its emotional course. The result is both a revelation for the viewer and the filmmaker, who finds new ways of viewing and making sense of their own work.
CREDITS
FILMMAKER | Naomi van Niekerk
COMPOSER | Arnaud van Vliet
MUSICIANS | Arnaud van Vliet, Micca Manganye, Stompie Selibe & Pertunia Msani
KASSARAM
Visual artist Thania Petersen’s KASSARAM, which loosely translates to “a big mess”, is a kaleidoscopic, collage-like journey into the history of settler colonialism in the Cape, and its intersections with art-making practices and modes of performance. In Sounding Pictures: Live Scores to Short Silent Films, however, this is merely a point of departure.
In the hands of The Sounding Pictures Ensemble, Petersen’s film is both amplified and expanded upon through a process of live, improvisatory music-making. The visuals — ‘Cape Malay’ singers and dancers backed by an illustrated map of the ‘Cape of Good Hope’, flanked by CGI tigers and bordered by flowers and winged ‘Twee gevrietjie’ biscuits — move to a dissonant and discordant soundscape. History, as it’s been told to us, is a carnival of chaos, a collage of conflicting voices and varied cultures and practices.
It veers towards a generative entropy: an amalgamation and ultimate distortion of music, performance and moving images that provide us with new ways of seeing the film itself, but also of revisiting and reviewing history through a collective, even embodied way.
CREDITS
FILMMAKER | Thania Petersen
MUSICIANS | Sounding Pictures Ensemble
Events on a Timeline
In many ways, Events on a Timeline is perfectly suited to the dramaturgy of sound being explored in Sounding Pictures: Live Scores to Short Silent Films. Penny Siopis’ work-in-process film, and the way in which she offers it to the process, is like raw narrative material to work with, developing new meaning and ways of seeing together with a live audience.
Comprising various sources of found footage depicting wild animals, humans, and bodies of water, Siopis’ film plays out, as its title suggests, as simply as a cluster events and actions taking place in succession. Herein lies the potential for collective viewing, and deep listening – to see these scenes play out and to both respond to what is being seen, and what is being produced in the room.
For some, like Aragorn Eloff, the process is intuitive in the way of the body. A sensor attached to his body feeds back into a modular synthesiser, allowing for his physical pulse and his affective engagement to dictate the tempo, timbre and general atmosphere of the score. Others, like Micca Manganye, AusTebza, and Pertunia Msani respond with percussion, bass and voice as they view the footage play out before them.
The result is a compelling and deeply nuanced score that manages to at times compliment, other times unsettle, and ultimately enrich the footage that we are seeing.
CREDITS
FILMMAKER | Penny Siopis
MUSICIANS | Aragorn Eloff, AusTebza, Pertunia Msani & Micca Manganye
Between the Wall and the Sides
Emerging from an incubation at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, Between the Wall and the Sides is a work-in-progress film project by writer, visual artist and anthropologist Dana Mashoian Walrath from the US, and filmmaker and educator Dylan Valley, producer Antoinette Engel, and musician Bongiwe Lusizi, from South Africa.
Merging their collective research interests in the history of genocides, scientific racism, Virtual Reality film, and indigenous musical tools and techniques, Between the Wall and the Sides is a fast-paced, experimental film that makes use of various visual, archival, and filmic materials.
‘Order, Hierarchy, Classification’ scrolls across the pages on screen, a mixture of hand-drawn illustrations and digital drawings. Musically, the score evolves in time with the film. As we witness the shift of human into animal on screen through Walrath’s drawings, the vocals respond in turn and the room is filled with the slow groan and wail of dehumanisation. Pained vocals backed by frenzied instrumental moments accompany the rapidly turning pages on screen. Here, Lusizi’s vocals and her use of the homemade instrument are crucial and lead to a striking crescendo in the room.
The performance deepens the work, too. Speaking after the fact, Walrath, Valley, Engel and Lusizi say that this collective reading of the work has already begun to help them revisit, reshape and ultimately expand the work. The act of deep, collaborative listening, then, becomes a cumulative process, too. Both inside the theatre, and in its echoes and aftershocks.
CREDITS
FILMMAKERS | Dana Mashoian Walrath & Dylan Valley
PRODUCER | Antoinette Engel
MUSICIANS | Bongiwe Lusizi (Mthwakazi), Pertunia Msani, Micca Manganye & Stompie Selibe
THE PEPPER’S GHOST
Kuthi Mandithethe
The film appears at the centre of the room – a woman fanning herself, staring out at us and eating thin slices of watermelon. She is accompanied by a live musical score, playful and upbeat at first, then slowing into something of a lament. A tear rolls down her face on screen and her portrait disappears. Just as suddenly, she appears in the room with us, lit by a single light and lying behind the image, the watermelon her headrest.
A series of tableaus and incidental vignettes, Msaki’s Kuthi Mandithethe draws on the musician and performer’s filmic archive. Through an engagement with the Pepper’s Ghost mechanism, Msaki and the musicians in the room refigure and recompose these scenes to form a collaborative and unfamiliar narrative, albeit within the greater thematic chapters of Amava, Isazela, Umsindo, Ukudabuka, Ukuzilanda.
These chapters can also be understood as stanzas, or short-form musical scores towards no certain end, other than a material, musical and performative exploration of sound, consciousness, spirituality and the moving image inside the otherworldly mechanism of the Pepper’s Ghost.
Though restrained, Msaki’s performance behind, inside, and in front of the film is key. The chopping of the watermelon is visceral, the floorwork full of play. Similarly, Billy Langa and Daniel Stompie Selibe’s musical and narrative performances behind the screen, and subsequently inside of the image, allow for new layers of meaning, and more opportunities for interpretation. It ends almost as it begins: a single light illuminating a still and contemplative Msaki.
CREDITS
FILMMAKER | Msaki
COMPOSER | Shane Cooper
ORATOR | Billy Langa
MUSICIANS | Reggie Teys, AusTebza, Micca Manganye & Stompie Selibe
The Labyrinth
A postcard view of the city skyline from an amusement park built on top of an old goldmine bleeds into the scroll of high walls and electric fences. Later, the kaleidoscopic hoot and blare of a gridlocked intersection glimpsed from above. In Noah Cohen’s The Labyrinth, we are invited to move through and observe a series of filmic and incidental representations of Johannesburg.
Floating above suburban vistas and crawling through inner-city arteries alike, are two characters — Billy Langa and Pertunia Msani. They are unlikely citizens, haphazard figures in a viewfinder loaded with domestic snapshots.
Nothing is preset. As the performers engage and respond live, Cohen rearranges and selects his scenes in real-time, working with the footage, as they do. Still, through the distorted lens of the Pepper’s Ghost, Langa and Msani are not beholden to the footage they encounter. Rather, they watch as we do, and respond in kind, dodging taxis and disappearing down pool drains, exploring the city through its uncanny vortexes and trapdoors.
As this spontaneous footage plays out, accompanied by the responsive ebb and flow of vocals, percussion, viola and spoken word, we watch as the two characters wade through this extended metaphor — diving in and out of rich pools of paradox, feeling the bloom and rot of jacaranda blossoms underfoot, blinking away the sting of chlorine and plastic fires and turning inwards, always, as they move further into the labyrinth.
CREDITS
FILMMAKER | Noah Cohen
ORATOR | Billy Langa
MUSICIANS | Pertunia Msani, Micca Manganye, DAPHNE, Stompie Selibe & Reggie Teys
Land of the Red Blanket
‘The Land of the Red Blanket’ is a 1934 archival film about the coming of age rituals and ceremonial dances that took place in the then-Transkei region of South Africa. While the subject matter of the film, and the context in which it was filmed is of significance, it is the performative engagement with this archival footage that becomes more interesting, and infinitely more generative.
Shown inside the Pepper’s Ghost, Land of the Red Blanket is a distillation of all of the points of inquiry and intrigue that animate the Sounding Pictures: Live Scores to Short Silent Films programme. Here, archival footage is lifted from its original context and given new voice, new life, and multiple interpretations through collaborative and improvisational modes of performance. What was once staged, anthropological footage is now obscured, complicated and perhaps even liberated through a combination of live vocals and instrumentation.
The performance is full of risk and the magic of incidental making. Images appear and disappear on screen, sometimes in conversation with the performance, other times at odds with it, and always carrying the ghost of the performers – the live players in the room working to provide a collective reading of what we are seeing, and in so doing, shifting or reshaping what we are seeing through sound and performance.
CREDITS
FILMMAKER | Joseph Albrecht
MUSICIANS | Sounding Pictures Ensemble
All text written by David Mann.