1920, black & white, 91 min.
Directors: Carl Boese, Paul Wegener
Cast: Paul Wegener, Albert Steinruck, Salmonova, Ernst Deutch
Score: Needle & Random Inc
Program notes for performance at Festival Arsonica in Sevilla, Spain:
‘The Golem’, subtitled ‘How He Came Into the World’, was the third in a series of films starring Paul Wegener, who also co-directed and co-wrote all three films. Based upon a Kabalistic legend of a man of clay made come to life, the golem of this film is the Golem of Prague, brought to life in the 16th century to protect the Jews from a hateful emperor.
I created and realized the live score featured in this screening of ‘Der Golem’ with Sebastian Meissner (Random Inc.). Instead of a set score, with motifs for the heroes and villains, and cues for dramatic action, the score is comprised of long, resonating loops of sound (some over an hour long) which randomly interact with each other, and shorter sounds spontaneously generated or improvised by the musicians.
Some of the sounds are simple synthesis creations, others are ‘reconstructions’ of field recordings from the early 1970's, damaged by age and varying humidity, of sites in Miami Beach, including hotels on the now “glamorous” but then decaying Ocean Drive which housed the community of European Jews who retired to South Beach in the mid to late 1960's. These sites were not only places out-of-time, comprised of the neglected remnants of the architectural movement of Art Deco, but also places out-of-place, seeming more like the Jewish “ghettoes” of Manhattan, with vendors offering slices of “New York-style” pizza from dusty windows than the former boomtown of the 1920's and swinging denizen of Hollywood stars, sports figures, and Sinatra rat-packers in the late 1950's and early sixties. The reconstructions are as much from memory as from listening to the brittle and flaking open reels of audiotapes. Some of the reconstructions pay more attention to the distorted sounds resulting from damaged and missing magnetic particles as to the original audio source.
Other “archival” sounds are from early phonographic recordings of Jewish music, reworked by Polish-born Sebastian Meissner formerly Random Industries and Autopoieses from Frankfurt, Germany. When Meissner supported Needle and Sony Mao on their tour of Europe in Fall 2000, he played loops of this music during an ill-fated screening of Carl Dreyer's 'Vampyr' for which I had composed a new “additional score” to augment the existing, original score at Gallerie Fruchtig in Frankfurt. Upon hearing the Jewish music loops, I immediately recalled the sketches for “Der Golem” which I had first begun work on after seeing fragments of the original 1914 Golem movie, and a near complete print of the 1920 version.
I was originally drawn to collaborating with Sebastian when he described how Random Industries used a laptop and CD-players to randomly access sounds during live performance. This was precisely the method used by Needle and Sony Mao in performance. When I heard these scratchy recordings of Jewish folk music mixed with my granular strings, I was stunned, and I immediately recognized the place they had in my score for The Golem.
Over the last two years, it had been very much on my mind to finally realize the score, but in turn, it was a project on the back-burner. Somehow, a bootleg recording of the film scores for ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Cailgari’ and ‘Nosferatu’ on Elegua Records made its way from San Francisco to Arsonica festival organizer Vidal Romero in Sevilla. Romero asked if I would present either of the films, or even better, premiere a new work, and I knew that the new work was to be ‘Der Golem’, fully realized, with Random Inc.
In the case of many of my soundtracks, even for my own film works, I see them as 'unfinished'. An 'apparatus' that I use for the film scores is that they are always incomplete, never finished until they are actually performed, because there are elements of chance in each film score. Likewise, when the performance is recorded, I don’t feel that document is 'complete' either. In my mind, once the film has ended, the score returns to its unfinished state, because the physical presence of the musicians and the audience is as much a part of the score as any sound resulting from our actions, and that presence is not available on a recording. However, one might take that document, and replay it in 'shuffle/repeat' mode with the movie running, and suddenly the score is complete. I never intended the listener to put on my CD and listen to it in a linear fashion. I would actually prefer that listeners take two CDs, plugged into a mixer and play them back on random/repeat.
There are no cues for action or motifs to dramatize interior or exterior motives. No orchestral or rhythmic arrangements to punctuate a scene down to the last frame. I have always made the choice to not sit down and match music with scenes, or create motifs for the characters. For 'Der Golem', especially, I have chosen to use my memory of the film, and the stills and film fragments of its predecessors, to inspire me, rather than to sit down at a media composer and work from a film print. Instead I have tried to create an atmosphere and an environment in which the story takes place and the players, including the audience inhabits. I have also taken my memories of the old Jewish community in Miami Beach, and my travels in Europe, to create the sound and the feel of the streets of Prague, the city in which the story takes place.
Walking those streets at one time is going to sound different than the next time. I may hear a song or a songbird, a child's laugh or a woman's cry. What does it sound like to walk down a darkened, cold, damp street in feet made of clay? Those footsteps will sound differently walking that street from one hour to the next, and they will sound differently to me, from my vantage point, than they will to you. Consequently, I don't want the soundtrack to remain static. I have worked to create music of chance, relying on synchronicity rather than synchronizing music to frames of a film.
In addition to the film imagery, I have used two other sources of inspiration for the ‘Der Golem’ score, one musical and the other literary. Almost 20 years ago, a musical performance, attributed to John Cage, was described to me in which ceramic vessels were placed within a press with pressure slowly applied to the jars until they were crushed.
The literary source is the novel by Michel Bernanos, ‘The Other Side of the Mountain’, in which the protagonist and others are eventually turned into ceramic figures.
From the film imagery, I have tried to imagine what it would be like to have no thought or senses and to suddenly be brought to life. What sounds would I be able to hear and what would they sound like inside an inner ear made of clay? Would I breathe? Would I hear my heart beat?
In the case of the novel, I have tried to imagine what would it sound like, the resonance within a vessel of flesh that is fast becoming a vessel of fired clay, and that is when I think of the description of the ceramic vessels being slowly crushed, the resonance of the frequencies inherent within the molecules of brick and glass, and the sound created by the stress of the physical pressure placed upon them.
Resonance is important to the sound for the film. Much of the sound is at very low frequencies. They are frequencies too low to hear, but they can be felt, physically and psychologically. I have attempted to not only impart a feeling of dread and horror, but the uncanny, the real, but not real. I have tried to create the sense of the uncanny by creating a physical presence through the use of sound as mass. The sound is real but unreal, because it isn’t heard, and its physical presence is not psychologically connected to its source. That is the most important element in the score.
