UID:
kobvindex_ZLB13831414
Format:
72 Min.
Uniform Title:
Adagio g-Moll
Content:
A video made of 6 renowned pieces of music that Zbig translates into images [Mozart: Concert for Piano No. 21; Chopin: Sonata No.2 Op.35, Marche funèbre; Albioni: Adagio ; Rossini: The thieving magpie; Schubert: Ave Maria; Ravel: Bolero]...The first shot - conceived to the music of Mozart's Concerto No. 21 - consists of a dance of elderly ladies and gentlemen who, getting up from their beds, wander aimlessly, meet, and go searching for each other down garden lanes. This was shot by an advancing camera oscillating from right to left. The second - based on Chopin's Funeral March - returned to the idea of horizontal series that can be found in Imagine. The link is an interminable piano keyboard played by fantastic creatures that embodied the passage from childhood to adulthood, from the time of courting to first loves, and old age. The same contiguity can be found in the next shot with Adagio by Albinoni, which accompanies Lev Shekhtman's long walk on wooden tables suspended in midair, as in a Buster Keaton comedy. Here the lost character comes across women in their underwear and men with crutches who must inexorably keep falling. The music of La gazza ladra inspires visions much more lively and spectacular of the following shot, set in the galleries of the Louvre (where Gericault's Le radeau de la Meduse thrones). Here the spirit of Méliès lingers even crazier than ever, in the plays of screens and white cloth, from which characters and objects appeared and disappeared as if they were swallowed up together with the camera in an extraordinary and dazzling choreographic vortex. In some moments in L'Orchestre, Rybczynski increased to the umpteenth power the mixture of irony and eroticism, an eroticism amplified by the fluidity of the electronic material. This is what also occurs in the fifth shot, in which the same bodies of a man and a woman float in the nave of a cathedral, creating sensuous geometries to the notes of Ave Maria. L'Orchestre could only end with a grand finale in crescendo. Ravel's Bolero suggested to Rybczynski the idea of the long march of Communism: a procession of characters who climb the steps of interminable stairs (in fact this was a variation on the theme of Steps) against the background of a sun (that of socialism) now setting. Workers, peasants, bureaucrats, Communist youth groups, party heads, KGB agents, with signs, posters, red flags and portraits, diagonally cross the field. The parade ends with the image of Marx, Fidel Castro and Stalin who trip while bearing a coffin with the skeleton of Communism. With this metaphor (the Berlin Wall had been torn down the year before) the curtain falls. After so much music, at the end credits only the purifying sound of little birds can be heard. (Bruno di Marino)
Note:
Engl. mit ital. Untertiteln
In:
Zbig Rybczynski Film & Video : [DVD Video], [S.l.], 2003, (2003)
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