Sound & vision

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This article was published 04/11/2010 (5437 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

EVER since he married music from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde to the opening moments of his first short film nearly 25 years ago, Guy Maddin has appreciated how classical sounds can elevate images.The Winnipeg filmmaker, whose style is much influenced by silent cinema, says he recognized early on how the right music could “pull the mood” of a scene, adding nuances or ironies that he hadn’t imagined while shooting.

“I quickly learned that my mediocre images could be made to look a lot better if the right music played with them,” he says. “Since I was dealing with micro-budgets, I usually used public-domain recordings on 78 rpm records of classical music…. Even the scratches and crackles seemed to lend a kind of bogus history to the film itself.”

From the beginning, the self-taught Maddin also took editing cues from orchestral music. “Half the time, when you’re a starting filmmaker, you don’t know when to cut. If there’s a shift in the music, suddenly you have a reason to cut.”

The celebrated 54-year-old director of films such as Archangel, The Saddest Music in the World and My Winnipeg recently gave up his Toronto apartment. He’s back to living full-time in Fort Rouge with his American-born girlfriend, an online pop-culture writer who also keeps a home in Los Angeles.

He’s hard at work editing Keyhole, the feature he shot here in the summer starring Jason Patric, Isabella Rossellini and Udo Kier.

Maddin is sharing his musical appreciation tonight at 8 p.m. at the Centennial Concert Hall as the host of Music, Movies and Maddin with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and an honour choir of high school students (tickets are $21.75 to $67.50 through the WSO box office, 949-3999).

The concert, which features projected movie photos and film clips, explores how orchestral music has enhanced about a dozen of Hollywood’s most memorable movies, including 2001: A Space Odyssey (Strauss), Platoon (Barber), Amadeus (Mozart), The Shining (Berlioz), Bolero (Ravel) and Fantasia (Dukas).

Maddin, a witty speaker who delivers his remarks off-the-cuff, has worked with the WSO a couple of times before. At the 2009 New Music Festival, he introduced a screening of the 1928 silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc, with a score performed by the orchestra. (“Someone came up to me afterwards and asked me for an autograph — they thought I’d made the movie,” he recalls with amusement.)

Music, Movies & Maddin kicks off the WSO’s accessible new SoundBytes Series, designed to present recognizable music in short, easy-to-digest excerpts. Each musical selection is no longer than eight minutes, says resident conductor Richard Lee.

Such “bytes” are ideal for first-time symphony-goers, Lee says. One of the benefits of performing pieces that are very well known, he adds, is that audience members can see which instrument produces sounds that are already familiar to them.

Maddin is a complete non-musician himself. “I can’t sing in the shower,” he says. “I can’t read music. I got kicked out of choir after about 30 seconds’ worth of audition in Grade 7. It breaks my heart, because music is really important to me and I listen to it non-stop.”

Though Maddin didn’t select tonight’s program, he says the choices are good ones. He knows the movies well and can speak about the mysterious, often unlikely way in which an existing composition can become indelibly linked in our consciousness with a piece of cinema.

A case in point from tonight’s program, he says, is Francis Ford Coppola’s use of Wagner’s fierce, stormy Ride of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now. “Images of the valkyries swooping out of the sky on wings in the original opera… have been replaced, even in the most devout Wagnerian, by images of helicopters droning out of the sky and bombing the crap out of Vietnamese huts,” Maddin says.

“It’s a perfect example of how music, when it marries up perfectly with images, just seems welded forever. It’s pretty hard to top Wagner in his original purposes, but Coppola did it.”

Another remarkable piece on the program is the majestic, ultra-dramatic O Fortuna, the “greatest hit” from Carl Orff’s cantata Carmina Burana. Though Maddin will discuss its use in Excalibur, it is often employed, he notes, to lend excitement to trailers for movies that haven’t even been edited yet and won’t be released for months.

“It’s so dynamically versatile and noble. It’s powerful, frightening, dynamic, super-kinetic, spiritual — so many things that you want your feature film to be, and so many things which most feature films end up not being…. It will be nice to hear it played live, without all those trailers getting in the way.”

The stirring O Fortuna has also been used in many TV commercials. “It’s used (to sell) wristwatches, processed cheese, probiotic yogurt — with the choir representing the enzymes,” Maddin quips.

In all seriousness, he says the effect of combining a particular passage of music with a series of images is deeply mysterious and nearly impossible to predict.

“There’s no scientific correlation…. It’s almost something occult…. Even great film composers like Bernard Herrmann, he would write, you know, Piece A specifically for Scene A for Alfred Hitchcock, and Piece B for Scene B, and they didn’t work. But then they switched them around, and they magically worked.

“So even the geniuses of the artform are still left guessing half the time…. Long before I read that, I had the same experience.”

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca