The house lights dimmed and so did the clinking of glasses and silverware. Ushers scurried across Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema to collect more kitchen and bar orders as King Kong and Godzilla warned the crowd to silence their phones on a homemade reel. Half-hidden behind a rack of keyboards and mixing pads in the corner near the screen, JG Thirwell adjusted some knobs. Passing by on the way to their seats, a few audience members whispered appreciation to the Australian composer who scored The Venture Bros and has collaborated with everyone from Nick Cave to Nine Inch Nails to the Kronos Quartet. His eyes remained fixed on the electronic contraptions he’d be using to perform a live film soundtrack.
Act I: Sonder
The evening’s appetizer, JG Thirwell’s own short film Sonder, started by plunging us down an endlessly winding tunnel to a jittery march of strings and marimba. Bells chimed like fractured glass as traffic lights ricocheted across the screen in kaleidoscopic motion. Overpasses and skyscrapers flickered by on a grim city night. Brass horns blared in waves as cars streamed over a bridge like blood cells flowing through a vein.
Suddenly the chaos softened: low strings and bass notes rumbled as close-up raindrops traced slow paths down a window and reflections of traffic lights slid by in the background. The city’s frantic pulse continued with a quieter heartbeat. The feeling was eerie and menacing, as if the nighttime metropolis were a half-dead monster, its twitches and palpitations exposed under a microscope.
Anyone who’s popped in headphones and gazed out the window on a long car or bus ride knows how our brains can sync passing scenery to any kind of music. I was reminded of Michel Gondry’s music video for “Star Guitar” by The Chemical Brothers, which exploits this effect to the cadence of a daytime train ride.
After 11 antsy minutes, I wondered what the main feature had in store.
Act II: Heaven and Earth Magic
If Jerry Seinfeld did a standup routine about Heaven and Earth Magic, he might ask,
“What’s the deal with Heaven and Earth Magic? I mean it’s just these black-and-white figures floating over a blank screen, where’s the earth? The only thing magical about it is that they can get people to pay money to sit through it, and heaven is the feeling of leaving the theater.”
Creepy 19th century cutouts of people, cats, a watermelon, skeletons, tubing and machinery, sledgehammers, and more watermelon aimlessly bounced across a black backdrop in Harry Smith’s 1962 stop-motion film. A male cutout “main character” appeared in most scenes (along with the watermelon), but heaven knows what exactly he was up to. Sometimes the sledgehammer sprouted from his body, and he’d swing it to crack open an egg from which another face would pop out to float around. Sometimes he’d smash a machine that disintegrated into other cutout figures. Occasionally the figures were framed by the white outlines of two opposing faces that filled most of the screen.
Maybe the animation style and abstract content were novel for their time, but they failed to develop into anything and wore out their welcome within ten minutes. I struggled to construct meaning from the literally two-dimensional monotony: was the sledgehammer that emerged from the man’s body and caused the objects it hit to rearrange supposed to represent the power of destruction leading to creation? I don’t mind feeling confused by a plot, as long as the movie is at least visually engaging.
Thankfully my front corner seat allowed my eyes to naturally fall back on the DJ, who entertained me more than the screen. The live soundtrack harkened to `90s electronic and industrial acts like Aphex Twin or the more abstract side of Nine Inch Nails. A bass-heavy dance beat pulsed through most of the set, with layers of ambient noise on top. The buttons on Thirwell’s pad triggered orchestral sounds and synthesizer notes while other samples looped in the background. Sometimes the sounds acquired a physical texture, like crumbling paper, banging sheets of metal, and various surfaces being scratched.
While a decent listen in itself, the soundtrack didn’t feel particularly related to the film. Transitions between beats and the entrance of new musical motifs never coincided with changes on screen, if there were any. The only time I saw Thirwell crane his neck to look at the action over his shoulder was toward the end, probably making sure to wind down at the right time.
The most exciting moment came when Thirwell stepped forward to a theremin. The theremin is played by moving one’s hand in the air closer to, farther from, and up and down along the length of an antenna attached to a modem-sized box. Its alien squeal brings flying saucers to mind, and is heard most famously in the chorus of The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and the breakdown section of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” Thirwell’s new state-of-the-art theremin almost had the tone of a distorted guitar. Watching his hand direct the piercing wails in impeccable pitch was a welcome injection of humanity.
Though differing in imagery, the two films shared a detachment from the emotional livesof humans. Sonder depicted the city as a living entity whose inhabitants circulated unconsciously through a larger system. Heaven and Earth Magic showed random individual objects colliding in a void.
Musically, Sonder received a more human soundtrack performed–on a recording–by an orchestra, the strings and horns communicating tension and urgency. Heaven and Earth Magic’s was more electronically driven, but the longer runtime provided room for ebb and flow between thumping beats and passages of arrhythmic fuzz.
I was grateful to step outside the theater and recognize thoughts and emotions on the faces of passersby and even car drivers on this sweltering summer evening. In the great park across the street, a symphony of cicadas and crickets buzzed non-stop.
