Thursday, January 05, 2012

Regen / Rain

NL 1929. PC: Capi-Holland. Een film van / D+SC: Joris Ivens, Mannus Franken (as M.H.K. Franken). DP+ED: Joris Ivens. [1932 score: Lou Lichtveld]. 13 min in the dvd duration. 2005 EYE Film Institute reconstruction with the 1941 Hanns Eisler music (Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain). There are no intertitles in the movie. Screener dvd viewed at home, in Helsinki, 5 Jan 2012.

Music performed by: Rudolf Kolisch (conductor), Tossy Spikakovsky (violin / viola), Eduard Steuermann (violoncello), Joseph Schuster (piano), and others. Recording: December 1941, New York City.

Reconstruction: Johannes C. Gall, Mark-Paul Meyer. Research: Johannes C. Gall. Digital restoration: Nederlands Filmmuseum. "Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain" was in 2005 realized by: Nederlands Filmmuseum, European Foundation Joris Ivens, International Hanns Eisler Society.

Introduction of the 2005 reconstruction: "In 1941, Hanns Eisler wrote a new score for the silent cinematic poem Rain (1929) by Joris Ivens [and Mannus Franken - AA]. A film print with picture and synchronous sound has not survived. The following is a reconstruction of Eisler's sound version of Rain - which he called Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain - with the 1941 soundtrack and a revised editing, based on the Lichtveld version of 1932."

A masterpiece of the lyrical documentary film. The story: it starts to rain in Amsterdam. Rain is one of the cinema's favourite subjects. Andrei Tarkovsky developed a whole philosophy of water in the cinema. Regen is a classic of the subject, playful, full of variations, perspectives, changes of light, many angles from the sky to the ground, reflections in the waterways. The score by Hanns Eisler is subtle, charming, modernistic. The restoration is good regarding the definition of light, respecting the full aperture of the image. No problem with the digital as seen on a tv monitor.

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