Simon Fisher Turner
Jun. 12th, 2020 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveI have loved the music of Simon Fisher Turner for a long while. The last album I have of his is a CD/DVD collection called Swift : 20 Pieces Of Music Film and Silence (Mute)/ Well the BFI a few years back restored the classic 1924 film of the expedition to Everest and SFT composed the music for the restored film. This was mention in a review in the Wire back in April of 2014.
“You cannot call them a musical people, but some of their instruments could belong in our modern orchestras.” This intertitle divides shots of Tibetan villagers playing pellet drums, a huqin fiddle and mouth organs, singing soundlessly. The film, shot by John Noel on the third British Everest Expedition in 1924, was a commercial gimmick, a compilation of adventure and exoticism along the lines of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook Of The North (1922): the expedition was financed by Noel’s purchase of the negatives and exhibition rights. When Andrew Irvine and expedition leader George Mallory disappeared in the last summit attempt, the film’s infamy was assured: the second failure of a spectacular British imperial expedition in 15 years made any document the focus of intense, bizarre and conflicted public emotion.
Noel was an admirer of Herbert Ponting’s film of the 1912 Terra Nova Expedition, The Great White South (1921). The Epic Of Everest largely follows Ponting’s formula: amusing vignettes with Tibetans and animals are succeeded by wide shots of towering profiles of ice and rock, upright black smudges toiling away in their midst. But whereas Ponting could only film until the fated Scott party left for the Antarctic interior, here Noel follows the action to the end, shooting the summit attempts through a telephoto lens from nearly three miles away. A sense of unreality pervades the landscape shots, often framed without human figures for scale, so that they resemble sets from a particularly arduous surrealist film or microscopic enlargements of mineral slides. This print restores the colour tints used in several sequences of the original, lending a gorgeous oddity to shots of glaciers gone turquoise and mountains soaked in red.
Music was important for the film. Noel brought in a group of Tibetan monks to perform at the London premiere; one of the climbers, TH Somervell, composed incidental pieces for showings, available here as extras. Mountaineers often live in a world of reduced visibility, cut off by fog and blizzards, lived experience reduced to the sound of cracking ice and snow gusts. Simon Fisher Turner contributes a new score with an austerity that suits this situation.
Bells, limpid string instruments and horns – including Cosey Fanni Tutti’s raw, breathy cornet – drift in and out, framing silence and field recordings like fugitive winds. The disc also gives you the option of watching with a reconstruction of the 1924 score, mostly compiled out of European neo-romantic orchestral pieces – Fourdrain, Borodin and Mussorgsky, all dark swelling strings and heroic flourishes.
This dramatises the major paradox of The Epic Of Everest: the music and intertitles seem anachronistic, borrowed from Victorian theatre and nationalist myth, when set alongside the modernist charge of its images. The film’s fascination with so-called backward peoples and landscapes, the silenced voices of the Tibetans, is the same that fed elsewhere into modernist music; it’s easy to imagine sections soundtracked by the primitivism of Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring. This fascinating study in temporality and nature is a great rediscovery.
I have ordered it on Amazon. This is the trailer.
The Epic of Everest (1924) - Trailer
Simon Fisher Turner - Microgroovers
Simon Fisher Turner - I Love You More Than My Eyes
Enjoy.
“You cannot call them a musical people, but some of their instruments could belong in our modern orchestras.” This intertitle divides shots of Tibetan villagers playing pellet drums, a huqin fiddle and mouth organs, singing soundlessly. The film, shot by John Noel on the third British Everest Expedition in 1924, was a commercial gimmick, a compilation of adventure and exoticism along the lines of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook Of The North (1922): the expedition was financed by Noel’s purchase of the negatives and exhibition rights. When Andrew Irvine and expedition leader George Mallory disappeared in the last summit attempt, the film’s infamy was assured: the second failure of a spectacular British imperial expedition in 15 years made any document the focus of intense, bizarre and conflicted public emotion.
Noel was an admirer of Herbert Ponting’s film of the 1912 Terra Nova Expedition, The Great White South (1921). The Epic Of Everest largely follows Ponting’s formula: amusing vignettes with Tibetans and animals are succeeded by wide shots of towering profiles of ice and rock, upright black smudges toiling away in their midst. But whereas Ponting could only film until the fated Scott party left for the Antarctic interior, here Noel follows the action to the end, shooting the summit attempts through a telephoto lens from nearly three miles away. A sense of unreality pervades the landscape shots, often framed without human figures for scale, so that they resemble sets from a particularly arduous surrealist film or microscopic enlargements of mineral slides. This print restores the colour tints used in several sequences of the original, lending a gorgeous oddity to shots of glaciers gone turquoise and mountains soaked in red.
Music was important for the film. Noel brought in a group of Tibetan monks to perform at the London premiere; one of the climbers, TH Somervell, composed incidental pieces for showings, available here as extras. Mountaineers often live in a world of reduced visibility, cut off by fog and blizzards, lived experience reduced to the sound of cracking ice and snow gusts. Simon Fisher Turner contributes a new score with an austerity that suits this situation.
Bells, limpid string instruments and horns – including Cosey Fanni Tutti’s raw, breathy cornet – drift in and out, framing silence and field recordings like fugitive winds. The disc also gives you the option of watching with a reconstruction of the 1924 score, mostly compiled out of European neo-romantic orchestral pieces – Fourdrain, Borodin and Mussorgsky, all dark swelling strings and heroic flourishes.
This dramatises the major paradox of The Epic Of Everest: the music and intertitles seem anachronistic, borrowed from Victorian theatre and nationalist myth, when set alongside the modernist charge of its images. The film’s fascination with so-called backward peoples and landscapes, the silenced voices of the Tibetans, is the same that fed elsewhere into modernist music; it’s easy to imagine sections soundtracked by the primitivism of Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring. This fascinating study in temporality and nature is a great rediscovery.
I have ordered it on Amazon. This is the trailer.
The Epic of Everest (1924) - Trailer
Simon Fisher Turner - Microgroovers
Simon Fisher Turner - I Love You More Than My Eyes
Enjoy.
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