Feasts for the Ears, as Well as for the Eyes

In the creative world according to Hollywood, film and music enjoy a tight yet uneven relationship. The musical elements, however critical to the texture of a film, must bow to the sovereignty of the image, and the whims of the director. Ask any film composer, resigned to the demands and compromises of the process.

But there are other ways of interacting between the two media--true collaborations where music and image approach equal importance. Some of the fruits of that other cultural marriage will mark the Southland’s classical music season, beginning this week.

In its concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Monday, the California EAR Unit will be performing a live score to a film from the 1920s by noted experimental German filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, as well the Erik Satie score to “Entr’acte,” a short film-and-music expression of Dada and Surrealism made in 1924 by French director Rene Clair. They’ll also play music, by John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow, to two recent films by Lawrence Brose, part of an in-progress series called Films for Music for Film.

Later in the 1997-98 season, in April, the Los Angeles Philharmonic will kick off its new Filmharmonic series, in which composers and directors are being commissioned to create new short film-music collaborations. Participants include composers Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein and Danny Elfman, and directors Paul Veerhoven, Tim Burton and Renny Harlin. The first one due is an animated version of”Tales From 1,001 Nights,” with images by Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano and music by composer David Newman.

William Moritz, a CalArts professor who helped put together the EAR Unit’s film and music program, suggests that however separate the goals of experimental film and Hollywood, interaction between the two is inevitable.

“Experimental work is usually frowned upon because it isn’t as intelligible to people,” explains Moritz, who teaches animation and experimental film history. “The studios are very suspicious of it, because their product is an hour and a half and has stars in it. There is a whole formula for Hollywood films. Nowadays, MTV and advertising [especially] are drawn from experimental film work. They take the techniques and substitute selling toilet paper for art as a purpose. But they do use the designs and jokes.”

Mainstream culture--from Looney Toons on--especially owes a debt to the visionary work of experimental filmmakers such as Fischinger, respected for his abstract animation work in Germany.

He fled Hitler’s Germany in the mid-’30s and quickly established himself in the Hollywood animation machinery, working at Disney, MGM and Paramount.

He contributed to the “Toccata and Fugue” segment of “Fantasia”--one of the most experimental, and most music-oriented, films in popular cinema history.

At Disney, Fischinger “was very influential on the studio while he was working there,” said Moritz. “They used to project his films in the cafeteria for the staff to watch while they were eating.”

A highlight of Monday’s EAR Unit program will be the rare performance of a very early Fischinger experiment, “R-1, A Form Play.” The connection came about through the unit’s flutist Dorothy Stone, whose husband, composer Stephen Mosko (another CalArts teacher), was exposed to the film through Moritz. “My husband brought the film home and was excited about these films utilizing music,” says Stone.

That film’s history reveals a bit of the fragile legacy of the collaborative film-music field. In 1925, Fischinger, a music and art student by then working in the Munich film industry, was approached by Hungarian composer Alexander Lazslo (who later also came to Hollywood and scored countless B movies).

Fischinger was asked to create a visual component for the composer’s music, but the pair parted ways when Fischinger’s abstract projections--based on manipulated cutouts that were in turn based on organ-pipe shapes--garnered better reviews than the composer’s handiwork.

Fischinger went on to present the film on his own, using a percussion ensemble to provide a musical element. The undulant designs of “R-1, A Form Play” originally involved three projectors screening side-by-side imagery in triptych fashion. Two additional projectors added color elements to the originally black-and-white film stock. The version that will be screened Monday was restored and reassembled by Moritz into a CinemaScope-format single film.

The exact score Fischinger used for his approximately six-minute filmis lost to the ages, so when Moritz first started showing it to his classes and other audiences, he combined it with a recording of a 1941 percussion ensemble piece “Double Music,” by John Cage and Lou Harrison, both of whom knew Fischinger while in Los Angeles. The EAR Unit will follow his lead.

Intriguing as it is, presenting film-music works such as this have their logistical obstacles. For the early experiments, there is the problem of finding prints and reconstructing the music; and although collaborations like Brose’s are still being created, concert combinations of film and music are more likely to be Hollywood movies and their scores than experimental works. The technical aspects are one reason.

The EAR Unit has no plans to tour its film/music program. “You need a theater capable of showing films, “ said Stone. “We’re able to take advantage of the technical resources at LACMA, [where] they show films all the time.”

This is not the first time Moritz has helped usher experimental film culture to area concert venues.

Three years ago, in a Green Umbrella series concert, Moritz’s restored version of another product of the eclectic modernist art movements of the ‘20s, Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy’s “Ballet mecanique,” screened along with its legendary score by George Antheil. This season, UC San Diego’s new music group, red fish blue fish, will repeat the performance for the series, Jan. 12.

In Moritz’s view, the trend is a healthy one. “A lot of the experimental work is like poetry, with great intensity and speculation about things, and ideas which are imaginatively put together and in surprising contexts that may not have simple meanings. That’s just not in competition with Hollywood films. It’s a whole other thing.”

* California EAR Unit, with films by Fischinger, Clair and Brose, Monday, 8 p.m., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. $6-$15. (213) 857-6010.