The Michael Nyman Band, a group that brings together the famous English composer and the musicians with whom he conceived much of his music, arrives at the Festival with a show created specifically for Futuro Presente, to explore once again all the potential of the relationship between film and music, between images and soundtrack.
Alongside selected parts from the soundtracks that made the artistic partnership with Greenaway famous, such as The Mysteries of Compton House, the first notable fruit of a partnership that continued for a dozen works, A Zed and The Tempest, Man with a Movie Camera is also set to music live, the famous film shot by the Soviet director Dziga Vertov in 1929 that tells the story of a cameraman's day as he films scenes of everyday life in Moscow. A film that Nyman had already scored in 2001 and one of the many stages that have marked the long creative experience of the English artist, made up of meetings with great directors and an idea of music as a personal experience in which “power, passion, instinct and pain” find space.
Considered one of the greatest living composers, a master of minimalism - the musical scene in which Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Wim Mertens are placed -, an eclectic personality with an omnivorous artistic appetite, Michael Nyman is today the recognized author of some of the most beautiful soundtracks in the history of cinema.
From The Last Tempest by Peter Greenaway to The Piano by Jane Campion, passing through Wonderland by Michael Winterbottom and the Hollywood Gattaca, the list of successes of this skilled weaver of soundscapes is truly astonishing. He holds concerts all over the world, directors would like him to compose the music for their films and he, increasingly an all-round artist, experiments with new avenues such as photography and directing without forgetting his love for music in which he knows how to blend folk, electronic, sacred and classical music with great skill.
Music for films
The Mysteries of the Garden of Compton House
A Zedoch
The Last Tempest
Man with a Movie Camera
Dziga Vertov, 1929
“I am an eye. A mechanical eye and I am in constant motion!” (D. Vertov)
Man with a Movie Camera is this and much more. The plot is very simple. An ordinary day in Moscow seen through the eyes of a cameraman: the awakening of the city, the traffic, the fun, the sport, the clatter of a train. At the beginning and end of the film, however, a movie theater appears and at the end the camera even ends up having a life of its own. It is then clear that the work that marked the peak of Vertov's career is not only the most complete expression of the so-called kinoglaz movement, or cine-eye, which supported the superiority of the documentary genre over fictional films, but is a broader reflection on cinema and art, "on cinematographic illusion and the factory of images" (P. Mereghetti).
