Music at the Wende: Five Skins Presents “Man with a Movie Camera - Человек с кино-аппаратом”
March 4, 2022
The premiere of a curated live score by Five Skins co-artistic directors Daniel Goldblum and Dominyka Šeibok. The performance includes avant-garde wind quintet music from Cold War-Hungary by composers György Ligeti and György Kurtág, paired with Dziga Vertov's landmark cinematic innovation, Man with a Movie Camera (1929, USSR).
The film begins with a bold declaration:
“AN EXPERIMENT IN CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION… towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema.”
With a wealth of wit and idealism, he documents life in three Soviet cities–Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odessa–through a transcendent and singular camera-eye.
Like Vertov, Ligeti and Kurtág lived at the extreme edges of expression, and their work is imbued with the same manic spirit of intense rebellion and irony. By melding the film with synergistic sounds, Five Skins hopes to further Vertov’s vision, mining the past to explore the alchemy of sound and image.