 In partnership with Continuum Contemporary Music, Images has commissioned five Canadian filmmakers to create new works, each scored in collaboration with a composer. Making its world premiere this fall at the prestigious Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ in Amsterdam, the project's North American premiere is set to kick off the 22nd edition of the Images Festival.
For this special presentation, the films' scores will be performed live by Continuum's ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and percussion, with one piece also featuring composer/violinist Malcolm Goldstein. In these projects, the essential relationship of film and music is realigned in five different collaborative processes resulting in five very different works. Most of the collaborating artists had never met or worked together, and with that, these collaborations represented something of a leap in faith, or a dare on the part of all the parties involved. The result of this engagement -some between collaborators as far apart as Toronto and Rotterdam, or Winnipeg and Arnhem - reflects distance, method, temperament, and still the individual voice.
Toronto-based filmmaker and poet Clive Holden and Rotterdam composer Oscar van Dillen's 2 Cameras @ Sea focuses on the waves: from reflections by the filmmaker's father on his growing up on the Irish coast, to footage of Vancouver Island coastal landscapes, to recordings of the North Sea off the Dutch Coast. Vera Frenkel's ONCE NEAR WATER: Notes from the Scaffolding Archive continues the focus on water. Collaborating with percussionist and composer Rick Sacks, ONCE NEAR WATER focuses on Toronto's relationship with its watery surrounds; a city turned away from its lakeshore boundary and in trouble, where ubiquitous scaffolding marks both aspiration and loss. In Behind the Shadows, filmmaker Christina Battle and composer Martin Arnold document the imagined moment when the delicate balance between natural and developed worlds began to shift. Looking back upon an event yet to occur, time inside this threatened world is caught in an endless loop. Montréal-based Daïchi Saïto and Malcolm Goldstein embark on an aural and visual exploration of familiar landscape imagery that they share in their district at the foot of Mount-Royal Park in Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis. Closing the program is a new short by Guy Maddin working with the British/Dutch composer Richard Ayres. Glorious tells the story of an aging crime family patriarch, holed up in a derelict apartment block. Maddin pulls out all the stops as the film unfolds into an orgy of paranoia, bursting ammo shells, rackety disarmaments and oral gratification from beyond the grave.
Continuum Contemporary Music presents the work of emerging Canadian composers alongside works by established national and foreign composers in its concert series, at festivals, on tour, over the air waves of the CBC and through recordings and the internet. Formed in 1985, Continuum presents concerts that feature the core ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion, as well as unusual instrumental combinations. The organization has been responsible for commissioning and premiering more than 100 new works from emerging Canadian composers in the first stages of significant careers. For more information please visit continuummusic.org
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