Odinnadcatyj (Das elfte Jahr), 1928, Dziga Vertov

Film Museum on Location:

In Weimar and Pordenone

August 29 (Weimar) and October 3, 2009 (Pordenone)
 
The project Dziga Vertov / Michael Nyman, which was initiated by the Austrian Film Museum, will receive its world premiere in Weimar on August 29, 2009, as one of the highlights in Nike Wagner's arts festival pèlerinages – Kunstfest Weimar. The British composer Michael Nyman has always held a strong interest in the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s. With this in mind the Film Museum, with its significant collection on the Soviet filmmaker and theorist Dziga Vertov, suggested a collaboration. Weimar will see the first performance of Nyman's new score for Vertov's film The Eleventh Year (1928), following which the composer will also prepare a new score for Vertov's A Sixth Part of the World (1926). The French-German TV channel Arte is the third partner in this enterprise, together with Kunstfest Weimar and the Film Museum, and will broadcast both works in 2010. In early 2010, a double DVD with these films will be published in the Edition Filmmuseum; it will also contain new materials on Vertov which have been compiled in the course of the Vienna research project Digital Formalism.
 
The interplay between films of the silent era and contemporary composers has also been gaining importance in the work of film festivals. At the Giornate del cinema muto in Pordenone, the world's foremost silent film festival, this form of interdisciplinary activity already has a considerable tradition. For the inauguration of this year's festival on October 3, 2009, there will be a screening of Erich von Stroheim's classic The Merry Widow (1925), with a new orchestral score by the Dutch composer and pianist Maud Nelissen, who has incorporated motifs of Franz Lehar's eponymous operetta into her work. This event takes place in cooperation with the Film Museum.
 
Dziga Vertov / Michael Nyman is a joint project of Arte, Kunstfest Weimar and the Austrian Film Museum, in cooperation with Digital Formalism, a research project of the University of Vienna, Vienna University of Technology and the Film Museum, supported by WWTF – the Vienna Science, Research and Technology Fund.
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