Jeune Cinéma, november/december 1996

About Kinopera

Take a silent film – Karl Grune’s Die Strasse (1923), a landmark of Expressionism that everyone knows but few have seen – seek out texts to accompany it – from Verhaeren to Georg Trakl and Ivan Goll -, compose a score that suits one and enhances the others, bring together four singers-dancers-actors and entrust a director (Denis Krief) with the task of choreographing a performance to be staged alongside the screening this is what François Ribac has imagined – and called Kinopéra. In doing so, he revisits the old attempts at “total spectacle” in the 1920s, which mixed theatre, ballet and film, and of which we are left with traces such as Eisenstein’s The Diary of Glumov or René Clair’s Entr’acte. A successful endeavour. Presented in a fresh light, dusted off and enhanced by four superb voices La Rue rediscovers a forgotten dimension.

The Kinopéra is touring the Ile-de-France region for several months, performing at Thecif venues. The show is well worth a visit.

Lucien Logette: Why did you choose a classic of expressionist cinema like La Rue?

François Ribac: I am very interested in Germany; I live with a German, Eva Schwabe; I have written two operas that are half in German; I read a lot of German writers from the 1920s and 1930s. One day, while reading Siegfried Kracauer’s book, From Caligari to Hitler, I came across a few lines in which he mentions Oskar Messter and his “sound” films from around 1908, in which a tenor standing in front of the screen pretended to sing along to the music played by a gramophone.

Lucien Logette: At the 1900 Paris World‘s Fair, there was the photo-cinema-theatre. But that’s not quite the same thing Kracauer describes, since he‘s talking about songs and music played at the same time as the film but unrelated to it.

François Ribac: I focused on two ideas, that of a sung music with a relatively tenuous relationship to the images – as far as we know, they were fairground tunes, popular catchphrases, parodies. And on the other hand, the purely operatic aspect of the phonoscenes, which interested me greatly. I dug a little bit into film sound practices; I also began looking into the literature. I found a book by Gert Hofmann, The Cinema Storyteller, the story of his grandfather Carl, a cinema barker, who talks in front of the films and occasionally plays a bit of piano, The Radetsky March accompanying… Caligari. He stands on his little platform holding a cane like a teacher. Not only does he replace the intertitles, but when the actor appears, he says, “That’s Fritz Kortner, he’s already played in three films, do you remember him in so-and-so?” The novel tells of the arrival of the Nazis, and the disappearance of silent film replaced by loudspeakers, the end of a profession. An entire culture is fading away. What interested me about this was the idea of the person speaking in front of the screen who, from outside the film, offers offbeat commentary on it. Since the idea of writing instrumental for a silent film didn‘t interest me, I wanted to compose an opera based on a film.

I looked among historians of German silent cinema for a film that marked the transition to what is known as the New Objectivity. I read several comments about Karl Grune’s The Street. The idea came up to build a libretto using works by Expressionist poets, Constructivists, or even precursors, from which we would try to find texts to illustrate the film‘s themes: fear, the night, prostitutes, the dance hall, and so on… It’s a film that relies a lot on space – on the contradictions between very open and very dark spaces.

Lucien Logette: Let’s go back to the texts. There are poems by Emile Verhaeren and contemporaries and a modern text by Hervé Le Tellier.

François Ribac: Eva Schwabe and I were looking for texts for the different sequences of the film, with different points of view, sometimes directly related: Verhaeren and the “tentacular cities,” for instance—the opening with all those exterior scenes, the accumulation of factories, the frenzy, the metropolis. From time to time, we focused on specific themes: the blind man, the child, and his innocence. Concentrating the vocal writing on one or two characters, I would create the illusion that the character singing was speaking about the inner world of the character visible on screen at that same moment.

Lucien Logette: The only drawback in the Kinopéra production is its richness. You cannot take it all in at once—watching the visuals, listening, and observing the actors. Yet, at a certain point, you simply let yourself be carried along, wanting to see it a second time to grasp all the nuances of its structure.

François Ribac: The idea was to explore all the avenues we had chosen: the epic side, Verhaeren, the cities; the partial identification between the singers and the characters; the point of view of complete exteriority. There is also the idea of the barker, the commentaries, and the idea of having the texts acted and spoken in the film. We even went further, we added sound to the ball scene, when the hero leaves the dance hall and is followed by the two pimps. We added an atmosphere, the sound of plates, conversations and dance music. The character leaves, moves away, and like in a talking film, the sound gradually fades.

Lucien Logette: How long did it take you to work out all the details of Kinopéra?

François Ribac: We came up with the idea about a year and a half ago. First we had to find the film, see if it coincided, read the books and so on. Then came the search for texts. We also conducted visual research—looking at Berlin Expressionist painting and Munich’s Blaue Reiter group, as well as lesser-known artists like Meidner who designed the sets for The Street, and Bauhaus painters, who are not very well known in France, such as Schlemmer and Feininger. We tried to find all the representations of the city from 1910 to 1930: Kirchner, New Objectivity, Constructivism. Initially, we wanted the singers to have an expressionistic look -green faces, painted up like figures in works by Kirchner or Schmidt-Rottluff. When we started rehearsals, we realised that the slightest nuance of colour, even in the stage lighting, made the project look completely kitschy. The film was so powerful that the only option was to eliminate color entirely, even from the lighting design. Consequently, we used only cool and warm whites. Denis Krief’s great achievement in his staging was capturing the characteristic gestures of Berlin—and of Expressionist and Constructivist painting—through the singers’ movements and lighting; he would show the performers specific postures from works by artists like Dix or Kirchner to replicate them.

Lucien Logette: How did you work with the director?

François Ribac: He arrived with a fresh eye and built the core of his work around the text and the score, all while ensuring nothing clashed with the film—yet without attempting to simply follow it. Consequently, the moments where he does amplify the action and aim for total mimicry of the image stand out all the more sharply against the otherwise varied approach.

He also initiated ideas we hadn’t originally considered; it was his concept to have the singers move toward the screen and to play with the interplay of scale and proportion between the performers and the colossal image—whereas initially, we had envisioned nothing more than a small stage in front of the screen with stationary singers.

Lucien Logette: Listening to your music, one cannot help but be struck by the relationship with Kurt Weill. What is your relationship with Brecht?

François Ribac: My training is essentially linked to the theatre, even though I love cinema.

That said, I don’t have a particularly strong relationship with Brecht as a dramatic model. But I do have a deep, openly acknowledged connection to Kurt Weill. That is certain.

Interview by Lucien Logette for the monthly Jeune Cinéma.