Silent films were never actually played silent–even prior to the 1900s they almost always had some manner of musical accompaniment. From a simple house pianist to a full blown orchestra for larger cities, there was always some type of a live soundtrack. And, while some films (especially in the later silent period) had either musical notes, or a full score that was sent out with them, audiences across the world received very different experiences when it came to musical accompaniment.
Thus, the idea of a “definitive” score for most silent films is a difficult thing to pin down–and the reason modern day silent films have modern scores recorded. And, while there are many great modern silent film soundtracks, there are many more soundtracks that just kind of ruin the movies, especially if you are the kind of guy who shrivels up at the merest hint of a major key. Thus, I usually end up turning silent film soundtracks off and putting on a black metal album to play along side the movie instead.
Sure, the Donald Duck vocals and abrasive guitars might seem like a lot, but the white noise, minimal repetition, and flowing melodies all match the flicker of the degraded film stock in a way that other types of music just can’t touch. Today’s post is an attempt to do a bit more than just put on a random album and let it play. Instead, I took Крюкокрест’s (members of the mysterious Pleskau Brethren collective in Moscow) 2022 album Ауфидерзейн, and rearranged the songs to fit the Ukrainian-Soviet filmmaker Alexander Dovzhenko’s 1930 masterpiece Earth.
Крюкокрест’s music is almost as much punk as it is black metal, and considering their primary influence seems to have been raw black metal pioneers Ildjarn–it’s also not an easy listen. But, it’s been a favorite of mine since I first heard it, and something about the music just made me think of Earth as a good first pairing for this feature–I guess I know collective tractor metal when I hear it (though, if I had to guess, this particular band probably wants nothing to do with any kind of communism):
My basic approach here was to take Крюкокрест’s album (which was 8 minutes longer than the film), and rearrange the song order to fit with each thematic section of the film. So I started by breaking down the film into its main sections–“old man dies” “dudes pee in the tractor”, etc–and then lined up the 14 tracks of the album with these sections based on track length. About half of these scenes I already had an idea which song I wanted to use (the opening with the spoken word intro, the ending with the acoustic guitar fade out, the wailing at 9:55, a few others)–but the rest I assigned based on whichever track length best fit the section. Of course, many of the songs did not fit the “feel” of the sections, so there was quite a bit of moving around until I was satisfied with a decent “rough draft” for my soundtrack.
Next I had to tweak the timings by lining up the pivotal moments of the film with the major riff changes of the songs. Luckily, both the film and the songs rarely changed ideas (which some would argue is another way to say the movie is slow and the album is monotonous), so that made things a little easier looking for big moments to line up (though also harder as I had fewer opportunities to line things up). The album also ends with a final 22 minute song that is literally the same 2 note riff repeated for its entirety (a song you will be shocked to find out that I pretend to like, AS AN INTELLECTUAL). I [mercifully] cut that into two 5 minute sections that I used for some central pivotal scenes, and that gave me a little wiggle room on timing as well. I also ended up with plenty of luck/happy accidents (the beat of the 2 note song even matched Vassily’s dancing in the central murder scene!) I still had to switch a few songs around a couple times until I was satisfied that they worked with their assigned section of the plot, but overall I was very happy how everything lined up.
I’m someone who considers “full albums” (and the track order established therein) sacred, so it was interesting to me how much more comfortable I was switching the song order around (and adding a couple measures of repeated riffing in two places) rather than editing the movie itself (in which I only cut down a few of the title card lengths to tweak some timings). I guess there’s a hierarchy to these things and preserving the sanctity of Dovzhenko’s final cut was more important than final track order. If you are curious, the order of the tracks I used for this cut was: 1, 10, 5, 6, 8, 2, 12, 4, 14, 7, 9, 14, 11, 13, 3. The original order can be heard here:
Just look at that cover–how could it NOT go with Dovzhenko’s Earth?
And, for all my talk of preserving the sanctity of a director’s final cut, just wait till the next installment of this feature when I absolutely MASSACRE Murnau’s final cut of Faust by turning it into a 60 minute music video for Sabbat’s The Dwelling. Really though, no one needs to see that middle section of horny devil shenanigans.
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