- Regen is an experimental documentary film directed by Joris Ivens in 1929. It can be defined as a cinematic-poem. In 2021 Breve Storia Del Cinema restored the film with a new score composed by Nikolas Labrinakos.
- Brimming with impressionistic, poetic images, Joris Ivens and Mannus Franken's "Rain" is a lyrical example of an urban symphony. The short film is composed of highly artistic photographs that capture the transformation of the bustling cityscape and the effects of the natural phenomenon before, during, and after the sudden rain shower in Amsterdam. Accompanied by the score of Lou Lichtveld, the film depicts the play of light and shadow on the urban surfaces, the trams, the canals, and the crowd.—Nick Riganas
- REGEN (1929)
Documentary film by Joris Ivens
Music Composed and Directed by Nikolas Labrinakos
Composer's Note:
First released in 1929, Joris Ivens's silent cinematic evocation of a rainstorm in Amsterdam, made with the assistance of Mannus Franken, has long been recognized as an early classic of poetic documentary. In 1932 it acquired an impressionist-style orchestral score by the Dutch composer Lou Lichtveld. A more famous alternative score appeared in 1941. This was a chamber sextet, precisely measured to the film, but which could also be performed as a concert piece, entitled Fourteen Ways of Describing Rain by Schoenberg's pupil Hanns Eisler - who was later to publish, with his fellow Hollywood exile from Hitler's Germany, Theodor Adorno, an important theoretical treatise, Composing for the Films, including a detailed analysis of part of the score for Ivens's documentary.
In accepting the challenge to create yet another and different score for this classic, I decided not to try for Lichtveld's rather generalized brand of 'atmosphere music', with its many harp glissandi, nor for Eisler's often intricately detailed correspondences to small details, but for a slightly more abstract, 'structural' approach: matching the pacing of Ivens's sequences, and contrasts of his cross-cutting, with equivalents in musical phrasing, harmonic rhythm, tempo variation, and so on. As a result, while the score often supports the visual imagery, it quite as often seems to run in counterpoint to It.
Just as Ivens's starting point was a large collection of filmed sequences of daily life from a number of Amsterdam venues, so I took as my musical raw material a pair of short, straightforward pieces of my own composed many years ago: Andante cantabile e piu ritmico in C major and Adagio in modo populare in A minor. Both pieces are pre-echoed in the introductory bars of the score. The first four and a half minutes of the film are then dominated by the Andante - at first unfolded straightforwardly then more displaced and crosscut as the skies darken. The A minor Adagio arrives with the rain at 4'.41", with its rhythmic central section reserved for a 'dance of umbrellas' at the apex of the downpour. After 8'.57", the two pieces are increasingly intercut, superimposed and dislocated to create a more dreamlike continuity in keeping with Ivens's increasingly elusive sequencing of imagery, with new material infiltrating the music as the rain leaves off towards the end.
Nikolas Labrinakos, 2021
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