In Atlanta: Film Love presents works of Mauricio Kagel

Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008)

Halloween weekend is here, and the Atlanta-based Film Love presents a timely night of unusual film and music at Georgia State University by the late composer Mauricio Kagel, whose compositions explore the shifting boundaries between music and performance art.

A second, different program, a rare screening of Kagel's unique film Two-Man Orchestra will be featured at Eyedrum on Thursday, November 11. The series is curated by Robert Ambrose, Andy Ditzler, and Stewart Gerber, and tonight's event is sponsored by the University's Center for Collaborative and International Arts. At the very least, the evening promises to be a viable and entertaining alternative to marauding hordes of zombies and vampires wandering the streets demanding ransoms of candy from helpless victims in lieu of their brains and precious bodily fluids.

PROGRAM ONE: Films + Live Performance by Bent Frequency

Kopleff Recital Hall, Georgia State University
Friday, October 29, 2010 | 7:30 PM | free

Musician as actor, composer as filmmaker, film as concert – the works of Mauricio Kagel constantly upend conventions and expectations. Often, his compositions are actually theater pieces played by virtuoso musicians in a concert hall rather than performed by actors in a theater. He instructed musicians to play guitars with fan blades and coffee mills, and constructed giant instruments in which musicians were encased.

In addition to creating a vast compositional output, Kagel doubled as a film director, with typically mindblowing results. Together with the contemporary music ensemble Bent Frequency, Film Love is proud to present two evenings of films and music highlighting the creative, subversive, and fascinating work of a key figure in twentieth-century music.

In tonight's program one, two short films accompany two live performances:

In Antithese, a hapless studio engineer becomes entangled in technology, leading to a comically disastrous climax.

Unter Strom features traditional – and not-so-traditional – instruments played with industrial and kitchen equipment rather than human hands, resulting in paradoxically delicate and fragile sounds.

In addition, Bent Frequency performs Match, one of Kagel’s most famous works, involving two cellists in what seems to be more of a contest than a duet, complete with a percussionist serving as referee.

PROGRAM TWO: Film: Two-Man Orchestra (1973, 71 minutes)

Eyedrum | Thursday, November 11, 2010 | 8:00 pm, 290 Martin Luther King Jr Dr, Atlanta, GA 30312

Program Two is an exceedingly rare screening of Kagel’s film Two-Man Orchestra. Two musicians are inserted into Kagel’s specially built one-man-band setups (of over 250 instruments!) which they control with their fingers, feet, legs, heads and any other possible way. Trapped in these enormous, overgrown constructions and dealing with their unpredictable malfunctions, the performers evoke everything from Charlie Chaplin to circus music to complete atonality in a virtuoso physical and musical feat.