Lynch Études

Slowly but surely, word is getting out that the Canadian composer Nicole Lizée is establishing a genre of its own, a hybrid of musical dialogues and discourses on legendary cinematic epics and their directors. In Cologne, the programme features études on David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, but Lizée has also paid homage to Hitchcock, Tarantino and Scorsese in the past. They are all directors with a special instinct for the effect of music in cinema, for the rhythm of staging, montage and image composition. Signature scenes and dialogues are looped, occasionally also animated, producing the material which Malgorzata Walentynowicz reflects live at the piano. An audio-visual synthesis of a classical concert setting and the film sequences which are projected alongside it and interacted with. This is not reverence or homage in the customary sense; instead, the films become an essential part of a new, independent epos of image and sound. A new genre, very much one of its kind.