Take away critic #3: “Filme Som” (L1)

FILME SOM (FILM SOUND)

Cesar GANANIAN, Alexandre MOURA

Brazil / 2014 / 00:09:17

In their encounter with the universe of musician Roberto Michelino, Cesar Gananian and Alexandre Moura offer a “synesthetic” short film, wavering between a musical recording and an urban film-poem.

“Film Som” first arouses a curiosity of forms, those of the musical instruments invented by Roberto Michelino. We discover them during moments of the artist’s live performances, which appear between frames of urban images with a distinct Wendersian accent. Mixing string instruments, percussion and various objects (an archer’s bow, billiard balls, etc…), the whole alludes more to kinetic art than to classical instruments, for it is above all the way these instruments are played that produces the originality of the sound. As a fitting contemporary of John Cage, Roberto works more in the sound than with the sound, adding a more playful dimension that resembles a musical staging.

A staging that extends as far as the city, often giving the impression that the music gives life to this urban space. A billiards ball that spins on strings, and then it is the camera – filming the city in the next shot – that begins turning like a washing machine. The connection between the music and the shots is more of an introduction than merely the effect of a music video. The illustration no longer has a place because the music is uncertain: the sound score, born from a dietegic impulse, gradually drowns in the distance of this city and becomes inseparable from the alternating experience of these two spaces.

The staging is in the avant-garde tradition, using plastic compositions, and plays on our usual point of view (Dutch angle, superimposition, inverted shots), troubling our perspective of this city.

Therefore, “Film Som” differentiates itself from a simple musical recording through its plastic compositions and its image-sound associations, all in eliciting in us, after the screening, the intense desire to create our own instruments.

Programme for viewing Filme Som: Lab Competition L1.