Mick Mercer reviews Lightwerx: Georges Melies

THE TRAKWERX COLLECTIVE
LIGHTWERX: Georges Méliès
Trakwerx

A dvd to give Steampunk fans wet dreams this is a 15 film/soundtracks offering of cinematic history with artists paying tribute to one of the most important silent era film pioneers, in case anyone thought it was an obscure George Melly import. I will review this in depth in THE MICK, as I can include more visuals there, but here you get a hint of what is involved, and it’s a fascinating release. While I would normally avoid really ancient films down to the lack of conventional excitement you can only view something like this with total retrospective respect for just what this man was doing at the birth of cinema, like a midwife gone mad.

‘L’Impressionniste Fin De Siecle’ gives a clue to Melies’ past, as he was once a magician, and here we see a man performing tricks, as Jo Gabriel provides gentle fluttering keys which turn briefly jaunty in turn with the crafty visual display. We appear to enter the underworld, complete with gauze-draped ladies and chubby male dancing demons during ‘Le Danse Infernale’, for which Tommy Santee Klaws deems relaxed acoustic and piano as accompaniment in a Buckleyesque style, although how lyrics of love quite fit this story of rumbustuous weirdoes I have no idea.

‘Lune A Un Metre’ is crazy, where a wizard we have to get used to seeing accidentally conjures up an angry moon which is forever eating and vomiting things, wizard included. Luckily there’s a commendably strern Margaret Dupont (Groucho fans will know) figure to tell it to fuck off out of it mate, or gestures to that effect. Jackson Del Rey himself, the driving force behind this project, having already done new Noesferatu and Battleship Potempkin scores, mixes doomy orchestral synth with a saucy oboe as well as a weird vocal declaration of lurve himself, so I assume it’s catching. Gods Of Electricity go for clattering ambient sounds throughout ‘Mobilier Fidele’ where we set inanimate objects moving, with furniture filling a house unaided. Lynda was on hand to point out to me the sort of things young Georges was doing which hadn’t been encountered before, such as close-ups, perspective, dissolve features etc. I nod dumbly and peer at the screen. (I like to think I do it well.) Clattery ambient they may be, but the Gods Of Electricity also have a cunning percussive rhythm going at times, like an undercover Gene Krupa on manoeuvres.

‘Princess Nicotine’ finds 17 Pygmies plucking and a plunking, with some lighter oboe and delightful keyboards, all of it seriously serene, with just a hint of suspense and unnecessary vocoder as we watch a fatuous oaf smoking a pipe, with the aid of some tiny girls who poke fun at him, and one deliberately flaunts her arse, which must have been way ahead of its time. Then again, it was Paris, I daresay, the capital of filth back then.

Cult With No Name are thoughtfully austere for their handling of ‘Le Melomane’ in which some hot chicks stand by obediently as their conductor removes his head and throws it up repeatedly onto some empty sheet music above him, and there his heads stay, becoming music notes. The tune appears to be God Save The Queen slowed down. Meg Maryatt also keeps things stark with keys and strings, adding jocular, wiggly electronics in ‘La Cornue Infernale Alchimiste Parafaragamus,’ where that annoying wizard creates something unexpected in a laboratory experiment which ends in his death, and here Meg adds some vocal weirdness to match the imagery.

‘Voyage A Travers L’Impossible’ is a mini-epic of a film, and totally mental, as people go off on a voyage of discovery in a train with rockets attached, meaning they can visit the Sun, which eats the train, so the music of Lea Reiss also shifts from swirly synth fun with a hazy female vocal glow, to some serious hip hop rasping bass and Industrial rock guitar, and it’s good to finally hear someone introduce solid modern sounds into their approach, because it doesn’t all need to be chintzy or delicate.

‘L’Eclipse Du Soleil En Pleine Lune’ is again wizard-afflicted, as he teaches dull pupils about the sun and the moon and the stars flit about, in what is the only dull film, in comparative terms, as so much of it takes so long to do anything, sleight of hand replaced with over-sized boxing gloves. Sparkle Girl runs backwards vocals through scattered ambience and film spool noise for it. ‘L’Artiste Et Le Mannequin’ sees 17 Pygmies pop in for a mellow blend of polite strumming as an artistic temperament snaps and he attacks a woman with a broom. There’s a weird noises alert for Stephan Graham’s appearance, and suddenly The Clangers are among us for ‘Le Diable Noir’, in which a man is turned insane and thrown out of his apartment having set fire to the bed while chasing out the devil, who he also attacks with a broom, clearly the Edwardian’s weapon of choice. Tommy Santee Klaws opts for slow guitar in a dying light and garbled vocals as the colour-tinted ‘Eruption Volcanique a La Martinique’ goes about its business like a miniature Gerry Anderson landscape, with so much smoke at one point you can barely see anything else.

‘L’homme a La Tete De Caoutchouc’ finds Melies blowing his own head up really big with the aid of some handy bellows, as Kulfi brings us an arthritically throbbing arty-punk mess. Smoldering Ashes have ragged indie charm in mind for ‘Le Locataire Diabolique’, in which some nutter occupies a barren room in a hotel, fills it with furniture and guests from his magic triangular suitcase, and even pops a disgruntled policeman inside a piano.

We close with the well known ‘Le Voyage Dans La Lune’, a veritable Jules in the Vernian crown: judges, wizards, hefty dames, it has it all. Men go to the moon, which they clearly don’t find as exciting as anticipated because they immediately settle down for a good night’s sleep, which Jackson Del Rey (for it is he!) has created electronic snoring for. His soundtrack here relies heavily on static and sonar bleeping but starts with the Apollo 11 countdown that includes the wonderful line from Houston that ‘guidance is internal’ which could be a nerd’s equivalent of silence is golden. We get “the Eagle has landed”, and end with “one small step”, which is entirely fitting for Georges in his overall impact, so music and film work superbly together, modernity and antiquity locked in a heavenly embrace, as the Houston team inadvertently admit to an interest in porn by gasping, ‘you gotta bunch of guys about to turn blue’ which you’d think they might have kept to themselves. Meanwhile on the moon the intrepid explorers turn out to be just what you’d expect, killing the first alien they encounter, and returning to Earth on their rocket, which descends into the sea by parachute. How psychic was he?

The music is rarely intrusive, which is probably the point, and hard to judge in some ways. Without the films it’d be a pretty random compilation, that’s for sure, but with these brilliant glimpses into the past it all hangs together like some suicide pact with a sense of swing and this dvd is not just stunning, but dead cheap, and will prove absorbing to more than just film nuts, I assure you.

-- Mick Mercer

Click HERE to purchase DVD