Goebbels Eislermaterial download

Here's a link to a free streaming download of Heiner Goebbels's Eislermaterial. One of the best examples of adapting a composer to new situations. It was thru Goebbels that I discovered Hanns Eisler, when we were both young and avant garde. Now Heiner is an innovative music theatre person and gets the German equivalent of Arts Council grants! But I remember when he used to play seedy gigs and the ICA.

We are Frank Chickens!

Frank Chickens has been voted best British Comedy Act in 30 years, thanks to some Anglo male artist trashing them because he didn't know who they were. This is a true Frank Chickens moment, thousands of people voted for them in protest. Now, after 25 years plus Frank Chickens is back in the limelight.

Frank Chickens were two radical feminist Japanese girls living iin London in the early 80's on the fringe of the alternative music underground. No-one else remotely was like them, they were true originals in those fairly uptight free improvisation art music circles, which included Pere Ubu, The Art Bears, Robert Wyatt, Fred Frith, The egg and I, Bang on a Can and a very young Heiner Goebbels. They were the zaniest of the lot! They paid for the first London Musicians Collective building, because they were the only ones who had any money.

I remember them singing the C&W hit "Four walls" where the walls call out to the singer "hello, hello" Nashville, completely subverted, the song made surreal and avant garde. Frank Chickens are still going strong. Here's their website.

Complete movie to download - Kuhle Wampe

You can see the WHOLE FILM intact below. It is over 1 hour long (not a clip), and can be viewed full screen. Perhaps in times like this we don't need to be reminded how soul destroying it is to be unemployed. How do people keep going? Kuhle Wampe was made in Berlin in the summer of 1932, several years into the last Depression. It's an amazing film, so even though the first part is desolate, it "needs" to be seen again, especially now in difficult times. The full title is Kuhle Wampe oder: Wem gehört die Welt, "Who owns the world". Think about that. Do politicians and crooked bankers own the world or can ordinary people do anything?

Bertolt Brecht wrote the text and Hanns Eisler the music (and a lot of the political rigour). Eisler's music is wonderfully atmospheric. He's completely underrated as a writer of music other than agitprop. This film was made only 5 years after the movies became "talkies", so Eisler's music really is cutting edge invention for its time. Movie music does not have to be sentimental drivel, it can be art. Notice how little dialogue there is : so much is expressed through subtle gesture. No need for translation. This speaks whether you're German, Russian, Spanish. That's the socialist ideal, but it's also profoundly sensitive to how real people function. It's cinéma vérité by instinct, long before the concept was formulated. No wonder Eisler wasn't impressed when he worked in Hollywood.

Even more exceptional is the cinematography. It's outstanding. The first part of the film is a masterpiece, an overwhelmingly moving study, like an elegaic poem told in visual images and music. A young man searches for work. But everyone is unemployed, men everywhere on their bikes, searching for any glimmer of hope. The film shows the bicycle wheels turning endlessly, all that hard work leading nowhere. Long shots of cobbled streets, the tall, forbidding tenement where the man lives. For a moment he pauses to watch street musicians play an eerie mournful melody. We don't know yet but it's his last contact with the world.

Up he trudges to the cramped apartment he shares with his sister, his brutal father and downtrodden mother. Every frame is poignant, even the homily painted over the kitchen stove. The young man looks out of the window, where a shrivelled pot plant struggles to survive. He looks at his watch, his only possession of value, and carefully puts it aside......his mother walks up the endless flights of stairs. The window is open, the flimsy curtain blowing in the breeze. A crowd gathers round the young man's broken body. When I first saw this film as a teenager it was devastating. Now, when the situation has become real to so many, it is physically painful to watch, but steel yourself. It's important. Politicans, bankers and those who think unemployment is a lark should be tied and forced to watch.

The second part of the film focuses on the young man's sister. The family become destitute and get no help. So they move to Kuhle Wampe, a tent city for the homeless on the banks of a lake outside town. Surprisingly, life is not so bad. People stick together, sort of. Real life squatter camps are not much fun. The girl then starts hanging out with socialist idealists. There's a long sequence shot at a real life rally, with sports and music. Helene Weigel, Brecht's wife, appears with her theatre troupe, singing through megaphones. She's the short dumpy brunette. The girl's boyfriend is played by Ernst Busch (who sings the Jesus Revolutionary song in an earlier post). This is historic documentary not simply "film".

Interesting how the golden Aryan physiques on display presage other kinds of party rallies to come in later years, but that was the fashion at the time, nothing sinister.

At the end of this lovely day out, everyone goes back to town. They pour back into the world singing the Solidaritätslied, the now famous "Solidarity Song". Vorwärts und nicht's Vergessen! Forwards, don't forget! Heiner Goebbels (see posts below) has been a huge Eisler fan since his youth. In fact it was Goebbels who introduced Eisler to me ! A few years back Goebbels created a work called Eislermaterial, a composite of Eisler pieces against a wider background.

Nowadays we know about Stalin and Hitler, so we know the solution Brecht and his friends proposed is not quite that simple. But in those difficult times, the dream sustained people as a statement of faith and hope.

See the complete Kuhle Wampe by clicking HERE


OR HERE

Heiner Goebbels - Songs of Wars I have Seen

This is a short clip from Heiner Goebbels's Songs of Wars I have Seen. It's badly recorded so make huge allowances. The reality is much better. Reality and image are good ways through which to enter Goebbels's world. For nearly 40 years now he's experimented with different ways of expressing ideas. Most of us are conditioned to thinking more or less in boxes: what Goebbels does is that mysterious space between boxes, where ideas overlap and change.

Most cross-genre hybrids don't work because they're approached as self-conscious novelties, from outside in rather than from within. In Songs of Wars I have seen, the duality comes from the very meaning, or possible meaning of the piece and thoughtfully worked through.

The texts come from Gertrude Stein's wartime diaries, where she jots down random thoughts. Her words seem embarrassingly banal. Why is she rambling on about honey when people just like herself are being murdered all round Europe? You want to scream in protest. But that's exactly why Songs of Wars I have seen works so effectively. It overturns your assumptions about what it's like to live in such situations. War turns Stein inwards, as if she can only escape the horror of reality by burrowing into trivia. "People go mad" she says, "quietly and slowly".

Goebbels recreates the claustrophobia of Stein’s world by shrouding the stage in darkness, lit only by fragile table lamps, which look as if they might go out at any time. The female musicians are huddled together, as if in a domestic prison. They’re musicians, not singers or actors, so when they read Stein’s texts they sound indistinct, but that’s the point. They, too, are in a world not of their own making. If they sounded polished or “thespian”, the impact would be lost. When they play, though, they create the poignant depths Stein dares not articulate".

Above the women are ranged a menacing counterpoint of percussion and brass, and above them all float eerie sounds like the crackling of radio waves or the rumbling of machines. It’s like bombardment, distant but persistent, creating the tense anxiety Stein tries so hard to suppress. Sometimes it does overwhelm, and the voices are silenced. A trumpet calls out from the background, deliberately distorted.

Stein ruminates on Shakepeare and on the Middle Ages. History seems to come round and round in endless repeat. Is barbarity part of the human condition? How do decent people cope?
Hence Goebbels's seamless blend of early music and modern, theorbo with sound desk. At the end words cease. The musicians leave their sophisticated instruments and turn to Tibetan prayer bowls, which make eerie, circular sounds, while behind them the whirring electronic background drones on.