NIKOS MAMANGAKIS "Excursion" & "Intermission" (GRE, 1999)

This sixth part of MAMANGAKIS Music For Films, comprises the revised by the composer, complete version of music from "EXCURSION" [ΕΚΔΡΟΜΗ, 1966] and the original soundtrack of "INTERMISSION"[ΠΑΡΕΝΘΕΣΗ, 1968]. It released in 1999 from Mercury Records (Universal) with MAMANGAKIS himself in production supervising.

Composer Nikos Mamangakis

Both movies, made by great greek auteur TAKIS KANELLOPOULOS, are placed - along with his internationally acclaimed film "SKY" [ΟΥΡΑΝΟΣ, 1962] - among the best poetic/romantic creations of greek cinema.

Director Takis Kanellopulos (1933 - 1990)

EXCURSION + INTERMISSION

The Saragossa Manuscript

He spend his days filling the silver sphere that adorns his tea kettle lid.

Still too big.
A bizzare avocation that marks his life’s last three years.

A STRANGE LIFE

A young Polish aristocrat, Jan Potocki (1761-1815) inherits 18th century treasures. A citizen of the world, he can fluently speak eight languages and, very young, dives into the vortex of travels: aside from Poland and Europe – which is his country - he is fascinated by Turkey and Egypt. In 1805, recommendend by the Russian foreign minister, the Polish prince Adam Czartoryski, he joins a russian expedition in China.

His encyclopaedic education allows him to commit in a series of scientific researches: he either traces the origin of the Slavs in a amazingly’s erudition work entitled Rechearches about Sarmatia (1789-1792) or fly over Warsow into Blanchard’s balloon, accompanying the French scientist along with his Turk servant and his dog Lulu.

Devoted to political intrigue, being a deputy favourable to reforms, he develops an intence political activitie in Poland, in the era of the four year diet ( the Polish parliament). Suspect of affinity to the Jacobines, he is forced to leave Poland for Spain and Morocco, where he arrogantly boasts that he is “the new kingdom’s Suetonius” .




AN INITIATORY NARRATIVE

Potocki’s literature work lies under the sign of travel. His real wandering is followed by an imaginary travel. His novel Manuscrit trouve a Saragosse (The Saragossa Manuscript, 1804-1814) is presented as the last fruit of his numerus tours. It is about an initiatory narrative which chronicles the adventures of young officer Alfonse Van Worden. Written in french and translated in polish in the 19th century, this collection of bizarre episodes, some times imaginary, some times philosophical and some times pointing to picaresque, is a frame narrative which’s structure reminds of the arab tales. In the haunted mountains of Sierra Morena, the characters that narrate their stories are often and involuntary drifted in space and time due to mysterious forces, incarnated in two Tunisian beauties, messengers of the night.



The fate reserved for The Saragossa Manuscript stood anything else but common. This large book, divided into 66 days, was brokenly and without the writer’s name published in Saint Petesburg in 1804, and by the first moment was accepted with enthusiasm, and with Alexander Pushkin’s admiration. Then the novel went all around Europe in manuscripts and also anonynous copies. Plagiarists – and among them some not at all inconsiderable writers such as Charles Nodier and Washinton Irving – appropriate some of the episodes and publish them under their name, achieving great commercial success. In this way, the eccentric passions, very close to mysticism, if not even to satanism, that hounted Potocki’s soul, keep fascinating next century’s wide public, eager for “black” novels.



The sphere has at last the desirable dimensions and fits with no difficulty into the barrel of the gun aiming the head.
Count Jan Potocki suicided in November 20, 1815.

"Annick Benoit-Dusausoy & Guy Fontaine: Europeean Literature". Translated by Begemot

THE FILM

Potocki’s novel (to be exact a version of it), was adapted for the big screen by the Polish director Wojciech Has in 1965. It’s about a three hours ( the original version was 182 minutes long) black-and-white film which indends to depict Potocki’s vision. Has keeps the main plot of the story (it would be impossible anyway to attribute the entire book, with it’s endless minor stories embeding into the major ones, and one into the other), the main characters (Alfonse, Velasquez, the Cabalist, Avadoro, Rebecca e.t.c.), and is also faithfull to the novel’s main charasteristics ( it’s frame narrative, the mysticism that colours Potocki’s world, the erotic elements, the humor, the piqaresqe and often grotesque elements). Along with the above, very good actors and Penderecki’s music score contribute to an excellent result. You can easily find and download the film ( the restoration of which was done by Jerry Garcia, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola) with English and Spanish subtitles, through torrents. Begemot has also made an adaptation of the subtitles in Greek, which can be downloaded below.

Το χειρόγραφο της Σαραγόσα_Υπότιτλοι


Update 21-10-2009

Thanks to an anonymous friend, the soundtrack can also be provided. You can find the link to it in the comments area.

Begemot

HIROSHI TESHIGAHARA: Woman in the Dunes (Suna no Onna), 1964

“Sand is a naturally occurring granular material composed of finely divided rock and mineral particles. As the term is used by geologists, sand particles range in diameter from 0.0625 (or 1⁄16 mm) to 2 millimetres. An individual particle in this range size is termed a sand grain. The next smaller size class in geology is silt: particles smaller than 0.0625 mm down to 0.004 mm in diameter. The next larger size class above sand is gravel, with particles ranging from 2 mm up to 64 mm (see particle size for standards in use). Sand feels gritty when rubbed between the fingers (silt, by comparison, feels like flour)…..” From Wikipedia


This is the technical definition of sand, made of and used by geologists, e.g. scientists. But what is actually sand? And what does it actually feels like?

Woman in the Dunes is a 1964 film directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, based on Kobo Abe’s 1962 novel, and it is a film that uses sand as a means to explore human beings, their nature, their desires and actions and, finally, their fate.



Niki Junpei is an amateur entomologist who is trapped, like one of his specimens, in a bizarre, surrealist situation. Junpei, being on an expedition to collect insects in an area of sand dunes, is trapped by some local villagers at the bottom of a sandpit, along with the young widow living there. His and the woman’s task is to endlessly shovel sand. In exchange, they are provided by the villagers with food and water.

Every night the sand is shovelled away, and every morning is inevitably re-deposited again; the monotonous (and meaningless) task is repeated again and again, night after night, without any sign that this will somehow of sometime end.



The woman, totally surrendered to her fate, accepts this situation as it is; for her, this is how things are, and they could not be different. Jumpei, instead, unable to find a meaning in all this, rebels against his Sisyphean fate, and tries in several ways to escape it, with no success. When at last he actually has the opportunity to escape, he chooses to stay in his captivity, having found a meaning (or believing he does so) into this situation; partly due to the fact that the woman is pregnant to his child, and partly because he has started working on a mechanism to pump water from the sand (and by this way giving a meaning to it).



In Teshigahara’s film sand is the mean, the instrument. Sand is the boundary and the limit, but it is also the guarantor of sustaining life, it is thus equally the precondition, the purpose and the target, even being (or maybe exactly because it is such) a meaningless one. Slipping like water and continuously changing its form, sand becomes the symbol of the world and of time, a time that is eternal and inescapable, time in which the human fate is created, and at the same time sand turns almost into a character of the film, having its own life; it is the character that governs human existence, like a (physical) god. Towards this god, which like sand particles is tiny, elementary but also huge in its wholeness, the human being, small against the world like a small insect, reveals the core of its existence; the desire for life, which is expressed in its most fundamental elements throught lust for sex and food, and the desire for freedom.



“Are you living to shovel, or shoveling to live?”; this is the question that the entomologist poses to the woman, and to all of us.


Woman in the Dunes is one of cinema’s masterpieces; surrealistic, deeply philosophical, aesthetically bizarre and highly erotic (it contains, in my opinion, some of the most erotic scenes ever filmed), is a film that someone worth to see.

With a small search, you can easily find and download the film, with English subtitles, through torrents (check out the Pirate Bay).

The film’s music is composed by Toru Takemitsu.
With this opportunity, check out the following post with Takemitsu’s "In an Autumn Garden" (it is NOT the film’s music).

JACQUES TATI: Jour de Fete (1949)

In a small village somewhere in France, the fairground people arrive for the carnival day. Along with the other stuff they carry, they set up a mobile cinema, where a documentary on the superb ways the American postmen have to efficiently and quickly deliver mail is presented. This is the cause for all the inhabitants to start teasing François, the postman, about his own lazy and slow way of post delivering. François decides to do his round the American way….

This is Jacques Tati’s first full-length movie, where some of the characteristics that mark his later films are present, and among them is the use of sound. Dialogues are often merged with the background noise, giving to other sounds – chickens clucks , horns, the bicycle’s bell rattle, dogs barks, doors creaks, birds tweeters, horse neighing, engines roars, insects buzzing, - the privilege of interfering with the plot, in the most hilarious ways.

Jacques Tati as Francois the postman, by Robert Doisneau

Below is a sample of music merged with such sounds; just to have a taste… (Audio extracted from the film)

And here is the film's soundtrack found at this compilation:

Extraits Des Bandes Originales Des Films De Jacques Tati (1967) (5,1 MB)

Chemisettes (01:14)
Jour de fête / Jean Yatove
Jour de fête (01:42)
Jour de fête / Jean Yatove
Chanson des forains (01:15)
Jour de fête / Jean Yatove
Tournée rapide (01:31)
Jour de fête / Jean Yatove

Jacques Tati official page: http://www.tativille.com/

For Jacques Tati and his work we’ll speak again.

DZIGA VERTOV Man With a Movie Camera (1929) / Soundracks by The Cinematic Orchestra - Michael Nyman

“I am kino-eye, I am mechanical eye, I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.” Dziga Vertov, in a 1923 manifesto about cinema.

Man with a Movie Camera (a.k.a. Chelovek's kino-apparatom) is a 1929 silent avant-garde experimental film of the cinema’s pioneer soviet director Dziga Vertov (Denis Arkadevich Kaufman). The film portraits a typical soviet’s city day from dawn to dusk, using with driving rhythm the succession of images from the city’s life: images of urban transportation, images of industrialization and electrification (vitally elements of early 20’th century perception of urban development), images of people at work, in sports, in entertainment, images of their daily round. The succession of these images, tremendously fast and full of juxtapositions and visual comments, consists of an internal rhythm, and this rhythm creates a visual symphony, an orchestra that joyfully vibrates by the movement of people and things.

Vertov’s intention is targeting to an “absolute language of cinema”, a language that is “based on its total separation from the language of theatre and literature”, and the opening titles makes this intention clear:

ATTENTION VIEWERS:

THIS FILM IS AN EXPERIMENT

IN CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION

OF REAL EVENTS
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(A FILM WITHOUT INTERTITLES)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A STORY
(A FILM WITHOUT SCRIPT)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF THEATRE
(A FILM WITHOUT ACTORS, WITHOUT SETS, ETC.)

Committed to these principals, Vertov’s filming denies the use of the above “aids” and instead tries to capture “life as it is”. For this purpose he uses the camera as an eye that can literally go anywhere and see everything: the moment of a child’s birth, the reactions of people caught unaware, the point of view from bizarre angles, the private moments that otherwise cannot be seen, the public places that are now viewed by a unique new perspective. The eye of the camera is everywhere, and this mechanical eye is the mean that can imprint and depict reality.

The result of this effort, thought, is slightly different from its intentions; life seen in this way actually serves as a tool for creating a new reality: this reality is the outcome of the mechanical eye’s mediation; in other words, the mechanical eye sees what it wants to see, and in the way it wants. This mediation, after all, is not tried to be hidden: in several scenes of the film, the fact that we are watching a film is always reminded. Watching the film, we also watch the audience that is watching the film in a theatre, and also, in several occasions, we look both from the point of view of the man with the camera, but also from the point of view of him watched filming. The self-referentiality of the film is one of its most significant qualities, a quality that always reminds us the fact that film making is an art based on illusion and artifice.

This effort is not free of ideological commission. Vertov is a Marxist, and with his film he praises the new order of the soviet state, and its transformation through socialist reformation. In the film the soviet citizen is praised as a worker who integrates with machinery, the new weapon for social transformation, and as the new type of human who, through the perception of truth that the futuristic city provides, can achieve new understanding of life and thus a new way of action towards the world.

Ironically, Vertov’s commitment to Marxism was not much appreciated by the Stalinists; his earlier works had already resulted to a disfavour by the regime, and this one just strengthened this disfavour. Vertov was accused of formalism (i.e. placing aesthetics before ideological commitment), and thus making inadequate use of art as a mean for the guidance of mass. What seems to be the real cause, however, is the fact that the regime realised that this powerful new way of seeing reality, “life as it is”, could be used exactly in this way; in other words, the totalitarian regime felt this perception of art as a potential threat.

Today, Man with a Movie Camera remains an important film not only for historical reasons; apart from its significance as a pioneer work in cinema and the history of moving picture, the film shows us the potential direction that cinema itself could have taken, much different from its actual contemporary one, and also the extents of “life as it is ” perspective, firstly as this is widely used nowadays in popular culture, and secondly as a means of political practice.

Some useful links:

The original (silent) film can be downloaded in various formats from Internet Archive here

The Man With a Movie Camera article in Wikipedia

Dziga Vertov in Wikipedia

It is also interesting to check out the experimental work for the film's "recreation" with modern footage here

The film has been released with several soundtracks. Below you can find two of them:

The first one is composed by Jason Swinscoe and performed by The Cinematic Orchestra (2002) (87 Mb)The second is by Michael Nyman (2002) (87 Mb)

The film can also be downloaded through torrents with The Cinematic Orchestra soundtrack.

Werner Herzog: The Wild Blue Yonder ( 2005)

“This is my story. Now, this is my story. I come from the outer reaches of Andromeda. Imagine planet Earth, the solar system, the milky way, your galaxy… I come from another galaxy, a blue one, way, way beyond your world. Where I come from is the wild blue yonder.”

The wild blue yonder, an aquatic planet in Andromeda is dead, and the alien narrator (Brad Dourif), one of his residents who fled to earth and salvation, tell us the chronicle of this death, his specie’s journey and failures, and finally the chronicles of human failures and our specie’s death.

This science fiction, pseudo-documentary film keeps in line with Herzog’s insistent point of view in aesthetic, ideological and historical aspects. The human being, trapped into its egoistic shell, is driven by ambition and desires which defy natural order; this is expressed into a society that either crushes the individual or, in the case of Yonder, flirts with self destruction. A heavy criticizer of modern civilization, Herzog insists in an anti-humanist viewpoint that finally turns out to be a cry for human reconciliation with nature.

The film uses original footage by the 1989 STS-34 Atlantis space shuttle mission and Henry Kaiser’s diving expedition in Antarctica, footage that Herzog’s filming ability manages to transform into an impressionistic vision; this, along with Ernst Reijseger’s excellent music score (and Mola Sylla’s striking vocals) creates an exceptional aesthetic result, fully aligned with Herzog’s previews works.

Wild Blue Yonder official page

Ernst Reijseger And Mola Sylla: In search of a hospitable place



UPDATE:11/7/08
The link (and the post containing it) for the album download has been removed after a request by the (representing the artists) company. Enjoy the rest of the blog!
begemot

Solaris

Η τελευταία σκηνή. Ο Κρίς, μετά την περιπέτεια στον Solaris, βρίσκεται ξανά στο πατρικό του σπίτι, κάτι ομως δεν είναι σωστό: μέσα στο σπίτι τρέχει νερό, και μάλιστα πάνω στον πατέρα ο οποίος δεν δείχνει να το αντιλαμβάνεται ή τουλάχιστον να τον ενοχλεί.Καθώς η κάμερα απομακρύνεται απο το τοπίο διαπιστώνουμε οτι το σπίτι, η λίμνη, ολη η γύρω περιοχή, ο πατέρας, ο Κρίς(?) ειναι απλά άλλο ενα δημιούργημα του ωκεανού πάνω στην επιφάνειά του.