Every New Year’s since 2008, Texas’ Ballroom Marfa has invited musicians to provide a live score for a silent film. The fifth edition paired the harpist Mary Lattimore, who’s accompanied the likes of Thurston Moore and Sharon Van Etten, with the multi-instrumentalist Jeff Zeigler, a longtime engineer for the War on Drugs who produced their 2014 epic Lost in the Dream. (They’ve both worked with Kurt Vile). In Marfa, the duo scored Philippe Garrel’s 1968 experimental film Le Révélateur, which ultimately inspired a collaborative album called Slant of Light. And now comes the release of their semi-improvised score as Music Inspired by Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur.
This collection presents two version of the score: a 45-minute album composed of 11 tracks, roughly split for each of the film’s scenes or major moments, and a version synced up to the film’s 67 minute runtime. Without the images, this is a fascinating entryway to Lattimore’s very unique way of playing. Her harp experiments make for perfect wandering music. You can hear strong echoes of her recent solo album, At the Dam, in this score.* *The ping-pong machine of sounds her harp makes with its array of effects pedals is no doubt hypnotizing. It’s a sound so multivalent and warped that it’s always made me want to close my eyes to digest the weirdness of it all (a hindrance, of course, to a project that is also visual).
Zeigler’s use of the melodica, especially in the song “A Tunnel,” strangely and successfully resembles the bold flourish of Ennio Morricone’s harmonica in his western scores. Throughout, it nearly haunts the background of Lattimore’s stray plucks. Zeigler’s synthesizer manipulations create ambient waves of noise that lend all Lattimore’s harp gymnastics an odd disembodied feeling. She responds in like by deploying delay pedals to elongate sounds and taps the body of the harp to use it as a drum. They also experiment with straight noise, in songs like “A Forest,” which is almost Glenn Branca-esque in its wall of dissonant tones.
When I did try to watch the film and listen to the score all at once, I was always just a little off, the film or the score always out of sync—human error framing it all. So watching Lattimore and Zeigler perform the score in person earlier this month, at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema, felt necessary. Lattimore set up at her 47-string Lyon and Healy harp on one end of the auditorium and Zeigler was behind a synthesizer, array of knobs, and melodica at the other end of the theater. Her harp was so large and grand that one of its wooden corners obscured the edge of the screen. The very physicality of the experience was overwhelming. Lattimore’s harp echoed and bounced off the walls at random angles, making the live sound a strange flickering presence that stuck with you as each new note lead into the next. The harp is a dramatic choice for the rather minimal and rather metaphysical film; it slathers across the story. Their score, in its own way, provides an alternative narrative for the silent film, because it creates a sense of drama and tension that is more openly up to interpretation.
The film is so intensely visual, so obliquely shot, and so very weird that the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze said *Le Révélateur *was a primary example of what he called the *cinema du corps *(“cinema of the body”). In his theory of film, *cinema du corps *was defined by a pronounced physicality, the cerebral faculties overwhelmed by the mass of sensations a film could produce (such as the awareness of the beat of your heart, or the ringing in an ear). When your body is able to fully internalize this, the experience of what Lattimore and Zeigler are doing is so one of a kind. But the profound difficulty of achieving the perfect experience makes the album a tad disappointing, with its disconnect between lived experience and what will always be just a recording.
