Glasgow Film Festival: Sonic Cineplex @ The Arches, 16 February
Sonic Cineplex promises one of the most diverse and innovative lineups of the 2013 Glasgow Film Festival. Co-curated by Cry Parrot, aka promoter and DJ Fielding Hope, who is joined on the decks in the atrium by Carl Clandestine of Clandestine Records for some interstitial audiovisual action focusing on music from soundtracks, the event features several legends of electronic music performing exclusive AV sets and specially-created cine-mixes for the audience of techno-heads, soundtrack fiends and cinema junkies thronging The Arches.
The first live cine-mix, a performance of a new score for the renowned German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Adam Stafford, is unfortunately cancelled at the last moment, leaving the organisers to screen the film with a pre-recorded original score of strident, creepy strings. It's lost none of its visionary power as a seminal screen classic, although Stafford's absence is a disappointment.
Luckily it gives the audience a chance to catch the fantastically retro AV set by Optimo-signed Golden Teacher, the collaboration between members of Silk Cut and Ultimate Thrush. Abandoning the post-punk/disco/house flavours of their Dante & Pilgrim 12" in favour of a sparse, industrial soundscape of scrapes, clicks and drones, their visuals are created on an overhead projector – photographs and drawings of skulls, statues, faces and strange objects are covered with textured gels, creating analogue 3D effects. It's a claustrophobic, eerie performance.
Similarly impressive is Krautrock legend Dieter Mobius' new score for Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a strong contender for the title of 'greatest movie ever made.' Watching the restored 2010 print, which includes reinstated footage central to the plot that was once thought lost, is an experience. Even without English title cards, the narrative is clearer and more coherent than in previous prints, the stunning design and technique of the film pointing the way for the huge majority of science fiction movies made subsequently. Moebius' score is crepuscular, angular and hypnotic, with themes and leitmotifs resurfacing throughout as washes of synth underpin more organic sounds of water, woodwind and double bass.
Glaswegian experimental post-rockers Remember Remember perform a thrilling and intensely emotional set to a film shot using early VHS-based special effects that show a Japanese woman in flowing robes moving in slow, Kabuki-style motion against a backdrop of stormy seas, tropical vistas, rolling clouds and sunsets. The music is the focus, though, as the band swoop and soar through intricate melodic progressions that recall the best of Don Caballero or Sigur Rós.
The brooding, majestic electronics of London duo Raime are perfectly twinned with their visuals, which show a ruined, industrial space populated by a sole, semi-naked survivor. Dirt-streaked and shrouded in a heavy military jacket, he moves through the grime and soot-streaked garbage in infinitesimally slow motion, his destruction of an old table becoming a graceful ballet, and his final upward leap into a sun-lit torrent of water reconfigured as the ascent of an angel or a superhuman. Using strings, deep, rumbling sub-bass and minimalistic percussion, Raime's performance is mesmerizing.
As the end of the evening approaches, difficult choices must be made – we abandon Andy Votel and Sean Canty's Neotantrik set in favour of headliner Jeff Mills, who's premièring his new cine-mix for a lesser-known Fritz Lang work, Woman In The Moon. At three hours long, it's an epic journey, tracing an expedition to the moon from the destitute hovel of a disillusioned scientist, through the intrigues and betrayals of the expedition's backers, to the journey itself. The film is yet more proof of Lang's visionary approach to filmmaking, with ground-breaking special effects so ambitious that they have the power to amaze nearly one hundred years later.
Mills' score, meanwhile, is a revelation – he uses his knowledge of the dynamics of techno to create an emotionally-literate, thrillingly-timed sequence of peaks, crescendoes and lulls, employing classic film score techniques – strings and washed-out synth tones, repeating melodic phrases – as the backdrop for some intense moments of four to the floor sonic propulsion, vividly bringing the silent images to life. It's a show-stopping climax to a varied and innovative day of AV entertainment, and gains Mills a much-deserved standing ovation.