by Riccardo Barone
“The far paradise” is an 1928 Australia silent film directed by Paulette McDonagh, successful performance at the box office when it was on. Yes, the attendance was extragood. But not today, in the 2017. What a pity! Why so disinterested today in what we used to be? Because it is not fashion? Art will never die just because other Artists spread it out and care about the past as foundations for the future. Silent movies are not only a huge part of what-we-were but an important witnessing of how we used to feel emotions, because involves more senses of what’s involved today. For at least an hour and a half the audience had to listen to what is used to supply the mute screen: music! So we could say in the past people were more keen to sit and listen without distractions, more focused, more interested. Impossible requirements and too many “demands” nowadays, isn’t it?
The music played for the silent cinema was so important as the movie itself because it had the responsibility to tell a story, to descript a movement, to characterise a person, to let the audience deeply understand and feel exactly (or partially, depending on the ability of the Performer/Composer) what the movie’s director wants to express.
The Fiddle Chicks move across the time with their amazing performance. Such a beautiful, complicated and exhausting amount of work there is behind their show! They perfectly reincarnate the Composer’s figure of the last century, who marvelously marries the image with the sound in a continuous storytelling. And it’s even more difficult when it has to be done with two violins! So no use of low registers, but in return what’s more expressive of a bowed, fretted instrument such as a string instrument? The violin is definitely one of the best ways to capture the the moving images on the screen and let them vibrating in the surrounding space.
Hundreds years of composition tradition is still living through The Fiddle Chicks.
Kryztoff Rating 5K
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