DAAU have contributed to the film soundtrack “Archipels nitrate” by Claudio Pazienza. The film actually seems to have been released in 2009, only that I’ve completely failed to mention it here! Shame on me. After a few showings at film festivals around the world, it was shown on ARTE earlier this year, but of course I’ve managed to completely miss that.
The Arenberg in Antwerp has a nice write-up about the film in French and Dutch. doku-arts.de also has an English text which says:
‘Silent planets. Planets on which life expectancy is measured in seconds… How long does an image last?’ Made for the 70th anniversary of the Cinémathèque Royale in Belgium (now named Cinematek), Claudio Pazienza’s Archipels Nitrate offers a unique and poetic tour through a film collection. An homage to its representative personalities and its pioneering curator, Jacques Ledoux, this personal selection of moments is a reflection upon the physical and psychological ephemerality of the moving image. ‘Sometimes intact, sometimes scratched, faded, almost erased. Images by the thousands that run wildly, uncontrollably, into my mind’.
Pazienza’s superb cinematic essay compiles magnificent clips of many beautifully restored films, from the early Lumière pictures (1896) to a short film by Belgium filmmaker Olivier Smolders (1997). The film is a distillation of the history of film, mixing documentary footage with moments from the great directors of cinema, from Chaplin to Fassbinder. By combining scenes from disparate times, Pazienza poses questions such as ‘Why are these images so embedded, and why do they trigger others?’
With a splendid musical score that includes compositions by John Cage, Béla Bartok, Georg Friedrich Händel, Morton Feldman, and DAAU (Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung), Archipels Nitrate is a fascinating investigation into the memories of cinema itself. Winner of the Grand Prix, Montreal Film Festival on Art.
No word on whether the band contributed original music, or whether there will be a DVD release or any more showings.