Lo que The Wire piensa hacer para celebrarlo (el número no tiene nada especial salvo los CDs supongo)

El articulillo sobre Martyn

Y la reseña del nuevo DVD musical de Jem Cohen. Esta es la info sobre el lanzamiento (hay montones de cosas más) en la página web de Constellation Records:

The Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale) takes place in October of each year. For the 2007 edition, New York filmmaker Jem Cohen was commissioned to close the festival, which he did with his program entitled Evening’s Civil Twilight In Empires Of Tin . This piece, inspired by Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetsky March , is a meditation on the decline of empires, juxtaposing images from the twilight stages of the Hapsburg empire and WWI with footage from present-day Vienna and Cohen’s hometown of Brooklyn, NY, where he traces his own visual meditations on the twilight of American empire. An impressionistic narrative is constructed through live readings from the texts of Joseph Roth, and a live musical score performed by Vic Chesnutt, members from The Silver Mt Zion, Guy Piciotto (Fugazi), and The Quavers. The music includes improvisations, wonderfully blown-out interpretations of Strauss’ “The Radetsky March”, and bracing renditions of a number of Vic Chesnutt songs. The result is a sort of agit-prop hallucination, a string of film vignettes bound by the poetry of Roth’s writing and by the sounds and songs of the live musicians.
This 2007 film performance was recorded (audio and video) by the Viennale. Video footage of the live event was then combined with Cohen’s original film footage and edited in Vienna by Jem. The live audio was mixed at the Hotel2Tango in Montreal by some of the participating musicians. The resulting DVD is a politically charged and unique hybrid of concert and film – a document of a very special multi-media performance, and one hailed as one of the highlights of the Viennale.
Empires Of Tin is being co-released on DVD by The Viennale and Constellation. It received it’s premiere screening at the 2008 Viennale , and will be commercially released at the end of the year. The DVD is packaged in thick 6-panel cardstock digipack with a fold-out insert card that includes an essay by Jem Cohen.

Y este es el ensayo del propio Jem Cohen que acompaña al DVD:

JEM COHEN ON EMPIRES OF TIN
(This essay accompanies the DVD release)
When a sound wave recedes, as with a passing ambulance, its frequency appears to warp and shift as the distance between the source and observer changes. Theres a term for this, named for the Viennese scientist who discovered it: the Doppler effect. I think of EMPIRES OF TIN as an exploration, in moving pictures and music, of the Doppler effects of history.

We forget that we live in the wreckage and the emergence of empires. We study them in school, fix their dates, and overlook the fact that their dead remnants and living effects still filter through our cities and news reports. In America, George W. Bush and his C.I.A. ex-president father wave from a photograph. One hopes theyre finally waving goodbye, but long after theyve left the stage, their ties to the oil industry and security underworld will wind and unwind from D.C. to Texas to the Middle East to who knows where. The contents of stock markets and secret prisons will shift for decades because of their acts.

In Vienna, which writer Karl Kraus once called the Austrian test site for doomsday, I sift through old letters in a junkshop, looking at beautiful handwriting under the occasional Third Reich stamp. I walk under a rounded arch into a communal housing complex where, in 1934, socialists waged street battles against the right-wing army and paramilitary. Elsewhere in the city, an enormous two-headed eagle hangs above an entryway, challenging passersby not to forget Austro-Hungarian glory days...which they do, regardless.

Making films over the years, Ive come to see urban landscapes as places where light and bricks and history meet and dance a strange dance. It has something to do with time and much to do with dust, with sifting through the wreckage. There is always plenty of wreckage.
Purely by chance, when asked by the Viennale to create an evening of film with live music, Id recently come under the spell of Joseph Roths 1932, novel, The Radetzky March, about a family from Greater Austria in the years leading up to World War I. Id been given the book by Efrim, from the Montreal band Silver Mt. Zion, whom Id known since making films for his earlier group, Godspeed You Black Emperor! More recently, Id enlisted Mt. Zion to work with Vic Chesnutt on the album North Star Deserter, a record whose dusk-drenched atmosphere meshed well with the books.

Meanwhile, a war dragged on (well, more than one) amidst increasingly dismal revelations of governmental abuses. We were all struggling with what it meant to be North Americans in sickeningly corrupt times. I realized I wanted to make the Viennale evening a kind of living collage, merging historical past and present. This would in turn be made possible by mixing new material with elements found in digging through the musical pasts of my collaborators and my own archives of film footage. We began excavating, with the atmosphere of Roths novel as our weather. From Chesnutts deep trove, we unearthed songs including Sponge, Distortion, and What He Is And Aint. Vic wrote the new song, Coward, and he and Mt. Zion began expansive deconstructions of the Strauss march after which the novel is named. Guy Picciotto and T. Griffin had played both on Vics record and at my Fusebox Festival in Belgium (as had Mt. Zion musicians and violinist Catherine McRae). At Fusebox wed initiated the WWI piece, which we now refined. Griffin and I had previously done many soundtracks together, as well as Choir Invisible, a recorded protest piece listing names of American and Iraqi war dead. It has been a recurring element in my projects, and resurfaces in Empires.

To these, I added films shot when last at the Viennale of an old wax anatomical collection and the astonishing WWII flak towers that overlook the city. I found a few chance shots Id made years before in the crypt where Habsburg royalty are interred in the most extreme coffins Ive ever seen. (In my research, I was to discover that some of these bronze monoliths were actually just varnished tin). I collected pictures of the royals, re-photographing them using only candlelight, and walked the streets with my 16mm Bolex, hunting for connections and parallels. Passing Wall Streets Stock Exchange I lucked onto the removal of the gigantic flag that had gone up soon after the 9/11 attacks. (It was only being temporarily replaced by corporate banners, but the footage proved useful). Empires always have remote and curious edges. Since I couldnt go to Silesia or Galicia, which played a big part in Roths life and novels, I began to see my own Brooklyn as a peculiar stand-in. Its relationship to Manhattan sometimes seemed like that of Europes hinterlands to some grand capitol and I became obsessed with an isolated, crumbling mansion on 3rd Avenue and 3rd St.; about as close as New York comes to imperial decay. It had the ghost shape of a neighboring house inscribed on its wall, and Id later find the exact same tracing when shooting a wrecked ballroom in Vienna. I also re-discoveredsome of my footage from so-called Ground Zero where what some saw as a clash of empires had erupted with horrific force and consequences. The Empires mixture grew thicker and thornier.

To add to the stew, I left a few holes in the program to be filled in later in Vienna where Id arrive with my Bolex ten days before the premiere. Just when I got there, chance dealt a great card in the form of Viennas own military exposition/parade, which provided our finale. We roamed Roths old neighborhood and shot some more, processing and editing the film days before the show.

Thankfully, Bobby Sommer, a linchpin of the Viennale staff, stepped in to be the live voice of Roths texts. His fine readings would become the shows mortar. Id had some good luck all right, but the logistics remained more than a little terrifying as the date drew closer. Finally, after practicing on their own in Canada, jet-lagged musicians arrived, and I ushered them on stage the next morning. Our full day of setup dwindled away, plagued with technical troubles. The one run-through was, frankly, dire. But the crowd gathering outside the doors of the grand Gartenbaukino made it clear that there was no turning back. Suddenly, it was past time to open the doors and open they did. Lights dimmed. Candle-lit images of Kaiser and cobblestones flickered into being as the band below slowly drew the Strauss march out of lovely dark chaos.

Standing right by the stage to whisper cues and signal the projections, I felt the musics spirit and Roths words intertwine. And as the show progressed, I felt as if a lost Radetzky Marching Band had peeled off from its regiment and was weaving down a bombed-out road, gathering force and momentum. Our newspaper-wrapped shoes held together. Vic crooned and yowled amongst ghosts of Yiddish folk songs and sampled ambient soundscapes and the bruising force of the full band. The images cast giant shadows above us, and the shadows gathered once more into the oblivious head of Franz Joseph. He would not have approved of our tattered flags. The closing images are of Viennas signature church, undergoing heavy renovation. Its distant scaffolding make it gloriously hard to tell if it is going up or being dismantled. Its a feeling Ive often had about empires.

JEM COHEN, 2008

Y ya está puesto para descarga en algunos sitios de internet. Si les interesa mucho, mucho y lo piden, puedo subirlo (me apetece verlo pero no descargarlo ahora mismo, pero soy flexible).