DATE: October 22, 2023
TIME: 6:30pm – 9:00pm
LOCATION: VIFF Centre, 1181 Seymour Street, Vancouver
This year, the landmark silent film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, will enter the public domain. To celebrate this occasion, experimental music duo Magazinist (Matthew Tomkinson & Andy Zuliani) will offer a live rescoring of the film.
A cautionary sci-fi epic, Metropolis holds up an unsettling mirror to our present-day anxieties around artificial intelligence, class division, the automation of labour, and the blurred boundaries of the human. It imagines a dystopian future brought about by the narrow utopianism of the technocratic elite. Magazinist’s score mines the uneasy zones of overlap between the organic and the machine-made, with compositions that echo the angular distortion of the film’s Expressionist style, the gestural oscillations of the workers, and the electrical charge of Rotwang’s iconic laboratory equipment.
With a focus on unique hand-built instruments alongside vocal processing, synthesizers, and other electronics, their original soundtrack supports the film’s mesmerizing visuals with a fittingly expansive score, including post-industrial rhythms, soaring utopian motifs, and dystopian drones. Embodying the subterranean labour of the workers on screen, the performers enact a restless quest of their own, to keep the Moloch Machine of music running throughout the film’s prodigious runtime without being swallowed by its hellmouth.
Early Bird: $18
From Sept 22: $25
Country of Origin: Germany | Year: 1927 | Language: Silent film with subtitles | 19+ | 135 min
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