From 1927 Joris Ivens and
Mannus Franken worked on RAIN for two years. Just as with many early films Ivens
shot RAIN with a hand-held camera. Helen van Dongen remembers that a camera
was always loaded and '…as soon as it started to rain Joris left the house
to film'. The pictures of Amsterdam under dark clouds, sometimes in pouring
and then again in sadly dripping rain were shown all over the world. In Moscow
RAIN was introduced into the Soviet cinema by Leonid Trauberg. The Amsterdam
streetcar rails, reflecting canals, puddles, wet streets, crowns of trees, umbrellas,
the pedestrians, bicycles, cars and boats were received enthusiastically. RAIN
is a new film language. It is not a documentary, but an impression. The pictures
suggest a slight feeling of melancholy, but it does not contain a real story.
When at the end of 1929 RAIN was first performed, the first sound films were
released abroad. The diplomat and musician Lou Lichtveld (known as an author
under the pseudonym Albert Helman) had, as Ivens had, a great interest in the
new possibilities. For the Film League Lichtveld made the musical improvisations
to accompany the films and wrote on film music. To make the first Dutch sound
film PHILIPS RADIO (1931) Ivens took on Lichtveld. A year later he asked him
and Helen van Dongen to make a sound version of RAIN (1932). According to Helen
van Dongen Lou Lichtveld frequently saw RAIN at Capi, Ivens' father's photo
shop, and timed the film with a stopwatch. In July/August 1932 he wrote the
composition in a few days. After that he and Helen van Dongen left for the Gaumont
sound studio near Paris where the recording took place. The version Lichtveld
had composed for was slightly altered by editor Helen van Dongen '…which
was quite usual'.
Various versions of RAIN exist. They do not only differ in length or editing.
Identical shots may have been edited the wrong way. The 1932/33 sound copy is
not ideal either. The variable speed at which the silent film was shot by hand
at 16 - 18 pictures per second does not match the mechanical speed of sound
projection. As an editor revised the version Lichtveld saw at Capi afterwards,
it is probably not identical with what the composer exactly had in mind when
he wrote the score. The ideal might be reached by a live performance of Lichtveld's
score with RAIN shown as a silent film at the variable projection speed of silent
films ('silent speed': mostly an average of 18 pictures per second). The sound
version is hybrid: tempo of neither pictures nor sound is correct.
Lichtveld's music for flute, three strings and a very important harp is occasionally
equally 'impressionist' as Ivens' pictures. Characteristic of both the pictures
and the music is that there is no dramatic tension, it is a sequence of impressions.
Lichtveld looked back on the music with satisfaction, as appears from a letter
dated 1981, when he heard from Jan de Vaal, the then director of the Netherlands
Film Museum, that the supposedly lost sound version had been found back. 'I
think that first version extremely valuable, not because I composed the music
for it, but because it was the first time in the history of sound film though,
that to achieve certain synchronic picture-sound effects, instrumental quarter
note music was used (by re-tuning the harp and making the strings follow it).
It was something that only later was done with the help of electronic music
(which did not exist at the time yet). My repeated contact with Oscar Feiniger
in Berlin gave me the idea, and the experiment seemed to me to be successful'.
Critics were less favorable and Joris Ivens, called Boris by Lichtveld, wrote
that 'the power of the silent film had been somewhat broken by the Debussy-like
music'. When after the recording Lichtveld left for Spain with everything
he had got and found himself in the Civil War, he had to leave all his possessions
there. The Leica Joris Ivens had presented to him was smashed by a vehicle.
In 1941 Hanns Eisler also wrote a composition for RAIN as part of a research
project, which as 'Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben' (Fourteen
ways of describing the rain) is considered part of his best chamber music. (See
Rain and Music in the previous Newsletter). Ivens, however, preferred the silent
version.
Next spring Film in Concert will organize a number of performances doing justice
to Lichtveld's original ideas. The Ballet Orchestra conducted by Micha Hamel
will perform the music to accompany the pictures of the silent film. For the
first time Film in Concert, with a long-standing reputation of musical accompaniment
of silent films, has programmed a Dutch film. Flip van Vliet, Lichtveld's grandson,
has planned to make a documentary of the rehearsals and the performance.
First performance: Wedensday
March 20, 2002, Music Center Frits Philips, Eindhoven
Wednesday March 27, 2002, Theater aan de Parade, Den Bosch
Thursday April 4, 2002, Vredenburg, Utrecht
(Times and places, see Website www.ivens.nl in due course)
Theodore van Houten (programmer
Film in Concert)
Also thanking Helen van Dongen, Cecilia van Vliet-Lichtveld and André
Stufkens