For five summers, the Walker’s Performing Arts and Moving Image Departments have collaborated to commission Twin Cities musicians—including Astralblak (2019), Martin Dosh (2018), and Marijuana Deathsquads (2017)—to create and perform new soundtracks for films in the Walker’s Ruben/Benston Moving Image Collection. With COVID-19 upon us, we decided to move Sound for Silents from its usual site on the Walker hillside online, and with this change in format, we were able to commission five artists who created a total of seven new commissions for films in the collection. This year, Lady Midnight, Cody McKinney, Dameun Strange, Andrew Broder, and Beatrix*Jar created scores for films by Bruce Baillie, Robert Banks, Adebukola Buki Bodunrin, Rock Ross, Tom DeBiaso, Kara Walker, and Mark Bradford.
As the artists developed their work this spring and summer, events in the world—from deepening isolation and anxiety related to the pandemic to the uprising over the police murder of George Floyd—permeated some of their thoughts and the resulting soundtracks, creating a stirring fusion between historic film works and contemporary sounds. To forefront their experiences and processes, we share their words on the making of their contributions to Sounds for Silents 2020.
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Kara Walker, Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, 2004, Video (B&W, no audio), 08:49 minutes. © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
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Kara Walker, Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, 2004, Video (B&W, no audio), 08:49 minutes. © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.
Lady Midnight is a vocalist and performance artist who draws upon her background in visual art, dance, and Afro-indigenous roots to create work that timelessly reflects our collective lives. She scored two films for this year’s Sound for Silents: Adebukola Buki Bodunrin’s Gather + Listen (2014), a work filled with colorful animation of hands clapping, feet dancing, and mouths singing to the joys of a Nigerian street party called an Owambe, and Kara Walker’s Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions (2004).
As part of her process, Lady Midnight wrote a letter to Walker:
Dear Kara,
Your work was one of the first I distinctly remember seeing as a child of about 7 or 8 at the Walker Art Center. My oldest and late sister, a painter, was visiting from out of town, and we often went to the museum as a special treat. I entered a round chamber of your paper cuts and fully felt the visceral experiences I was witnessing. It would be the first time I felt the overwhelming atrocities inflicted on my people within my own small body and forever changed my perception of myself in relation to whiteness and the responsibility of art. Scoring this piece has been a great challenge of which I am deeply honored to undertake. I can’t help but see the correlation between your piece Testimony and the execution of George Floyd. The running time is approximately 8:46 seconds, the same amount of time officer Chauvin spent kneeling on George’s neck resulting in his death. The correlation between bearing witness worldwide of a public “lynching” and the complacent progression of violence resulting in a literal lynching in your piece. As the city contemplates the abolition of Police, we collectively have been considering the perils of dismantling “the master’s house with the master’s tools.” Now more than ever, we mustn’t look away. We must stare directly at ourselves and at each other’s most unfavorable and horrific parts and own them. This is what your work has always done without hesitation. Thank you for creating it and holding the great burden of necessary and difficult truth.
Sincerely,
Adriana Rimpel (Lady Midnight)
Walker, upon watching the newly scored version of her work, responded that Lady Midnight’s soundtrack “made the film come alive.”
Many might know Minneapolis-born musician Andrew Broder from his solo project Fog, but he also fronts the rock band The Cloak Ox and has a hand in numerous other projects and collaborations. The tension that has been building around these four months of social isolation seems accurately translated in the poignant soundtrack he created for filmmaker Tom DeBiaso’s film Head, from 1978. Broder shares:
My first reaction to the film Head was stress. It was difficult to pay attention, and I became slightly agitated as I watched the repetitive edits of seemingly monotonous footage—a single black-and-white shot of a person, turning their head back and forth, repeatedly. I felt uneasy. I sat with this feeling for a while. I tried to understand why it made me feel this way.
I realized how much I had been looking at my phone for the last several years, and how quickly, throughout nearly every day, I have scrolled through thousands and thousands of images—words, friends, strangers, politicians, hot takes, cheaply manipulative advertisements, and heartfelt pleas for justice—endlessly swirling together, washing over my mind and my soul. These images move me, inspire me, make me laugh, make me angry, make me sad, bring me hope, paralyze me, crush me, bring me things to buy, things to reject, things to donate to and to volunteer for, people to care about that I will never know, people to hate that I will never meet, snap judgements of lives and situations that I can barely relate to, new information and statistics that I don’t have the educational background to possibly comprehend, ecological disaster on a scale that no single living creature could summon the strength to push back against.
And then I returned to Head.
I sank into its focus, its meditative quality, its patience and its purpose. I found the reason why I chose to score this film, which was to illuminate something about our inability to see each other clearly in this moment. I wanted my score, and how it moves with this film, to feel like so many of us right now—fighting by instinct to cut through the roar of our feed and get to love, to care, to calm, to empathy, to nature, and to connection with others—but impeded, almost by the minute, by the second, by the brutalizing effect of events and technology on our psyches. I wanted to score our fight to see each other. Our hair, our pores, our little smiles, our tics, our dimples, our sore necks and tense shoulders. The shared understanding of our bodily movements and perceptions. The intimacy we deny ourselves in our daily interactions.
In times of transition and upheaval, individual perspectives can seem useless, even counter-productive, especially from those of us privileged enough to have lived lives of opportunity and expression.
I can only trust in my own desire to, as a matter of survival, know others better as the guiding force in my work.
DeBiaso, who has been making films in Minneapolis for several decades, is a well-known teacher of film and media studies at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), where he is professor emeritus. His films have shown at the Whitney, the Wexner, and the Walker as well as many other venues nationally and internationally. No stranger to experimentation, he contributed his thoughts about being part of 2020 Sound for Silents:
The idea of including a film that I had made decades earlier and to hand it over to a contemporary composer, was incredibly intriguing. I was also interested in seeing how something made in a creative period of 1970s experimental cinema, challenging traditional narrative cinema with a long-form meditative experience, could be an engaging and relevant experience in 2020. The action of creative interpretation is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately as the solo practice of the visual artist is too often one of isolation, so this opportunity for my film being reinterpreted was incredibly timely. Curatorial choice as part of the creative process is fundamental in building the films for Sound for Silents: pairing a composer to make a track for a film that was initially conceived as a silent experience is a bold move. I love the concept! Matching my film Head with composer Andrew Broder was inspiring—he captured the concept and sensibility of the film and extended the viewing experience in a sensitive and experiential manner. I intentionally had not seen the final film until the members-only screening and was thrilled and inspired with the outcome, which truly held the spirit of independent cinema in its heart. Thanks to Andrew Broder for his brilliant composition and exciting vision with this work.
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Rock Ross, Stupor Mundi, 1999. Photo courtesy Walker Art Center.
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Rock Ross, Stupor Mundi, 1999. Photo courtesy Walker Art Center.
Dameun Strange lives in Saint Paul, where he has been a featured lecturer on community-based and 21st-century art at Macalester College and the University of Minnesota. Strange is a sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer whose conceptual chamber works, choral pieces, and operas are focused on stories of the African diaspora, often exploring Afrofuturist themes. For Sounds for Silents, Strange selected Rock Ross’s film Stupor Mundi (1999), a timeless silent-era spoof on American politics. He writes:
Rock Ross seems to have created a film that truly spoke to this moment in time for me. I was initially drawn to the surrealist nature of the film and thought it would be interesting to examine the characters/ideas of Liberty, Justice, and Death in our country. The interrogation of Death as seduction is certainly not a new one, and thinking of that seduction as a corrupting force challenges us to examine the flip side to both Liberty and Justice. And when we do that, we see how in America, our concept of Liberty has been exposed by COVID-19 as nothing but selfish individualism. We see how easily the idea of Justice in America has really been genocidal policies that has formed this nation’s foundation.
For the soundtrack, I wanted to keep the prospect of true Liberty and Justice being at their core humanist concepts and driven by how we care for one another. Celebrating those versions of the sibling’s heroines, I gave them a triumphant spiritual fanfare played on saxophones. Death was given a theme that to me contrasts nicely with horn; in a distorted bass motif, it feels like a weight tugging, pulling from the top of each scene he is in. I tried to bring as many acoustic sounds in, from cymbals to shakers and rattles, to represent the natural mysticism at play in the “truer” versions of Liberty and Justice. But underneath everything is a drone of uneasiness that eventually grows into chaos as Liberty and Justice are corrupted.
The most interesting thing in terms of the timeliness of this piece is the origin of the term “Stupor Mundi” (Marvel of the World or Astonishment of the World), as we are witnessing what it may have been like to be ruled by Emperor Fredrick II of Germany as the world watches in astonishment all of these revelations regarding America in contrast to the myth of exceptionalism which had been the narrative more few generations.
The Minneapolis-based art collective Beatrix*Jar (Bianca Janine Pettis and Jacob Aaron Roske), created two soundtracks for this year’s Sound for Silents. One is for Mark Bradford’s performance video, Practice (2004), which shows the artist playing basketball while wearing an antebellum dress made from a Los Angeles Lakers uniform. The playful yet serious tone of the soundtrack speaks to the challenges of culture, gender, and race that Bradford touches on in his video. With the passing of Bruce Baillie this spring, it was timely that Beatrix*Jar was able to select one of his films to score. Tung (1966) is a lyrical, color-field poem of light honoring Baillie’s friend, Tung, and Beatrix*Jar’s soundtrack brings it back to life, giving it a 21st century life.
The duo provides insight about creating a soundtrack for Tung:
We were inspired by the luscious and colorful abstract visuals of Tung. Initially we created a guitar and bass track with heavy fuzz and delay; watching the film with those sounds made the work feel ominous. We created another track that was just layers of our voices, but we decided we wanted to support the text in a less obvious way. In search of more experimental and playful sounds, our final audio takes of Tung incorporated a digital Moog synth and an analog drum machine layered with guitar pedals. We also added a touch of vocals in support of the text.
For his film, Minneapolis-based bassist, composer, improviser, and sound artist Cody McKinney picked Robert Banks’s Motion Picture Genocide (1997). Banks made this 35mm direct-animation film by cutting up found footage showing the exploitation of Blacks in cinema. He scratched the emulsion and hand painted onto the footage to make this legendary racially charged experimental film. McKinney chose to honor the film by adding his subtle yet powerful undertones of beats and an ambient accompaniment to the bold imagery.
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