Anemic Cinema @ the Roxy: Stroma goes to the movies

A frame from Len Lye’s film Tusalava (1929)

The mid-winter Lōemis Festival in Wellington this month has a focus on multi-disciplinary creations of all kinds. Stroma, Wellington's daring new music ensemble, making its first appearance during Lōemis, combines film and music in what artistic director Michael Norris calls "a glorious, mad collision."

The sparks flying from that crash date back to the experimental work of film-makers from the beginning of the 20th century, Dadaism and Surrealism, and artists like Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Luis Buñuel and New Zealand's own Len Lye. The composers working with their films are more recent sound artists, responding to what's on screen and enhancing the audience's experiences and reactions.

Not all of the films in this adventurous programme were as comfortable as the broad armchairs of the art deco Roxy Cinema. In an event named after Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema, there was nothing pallid in the black-and-white images on screen and the brightly coloured music created by this crack musical ensemble.

I’ll start at the end with the two significant musical premieres, new scores for animated films, by New Zealand composers David Long and Andrew Faleatua, both present in the audience.

Long’s Fish, moon is a live soundtrack for local composer and film-maker David Downes’ film from 2014, itself originally created to accompany a composition by Michael Norris.

An image from David Downes’ film Fish, Moon

…presented with a new and skilfully woven soundtrack by composer David Long.

After some confronting images earlier in the programme (which I’ll come to), the audience relaxed to enjoy Downes’ animated scenes from nature, starting with a flopping fish and shifting to a hill, a tree, a buzzing fly, the night sky with crescent moon, all rolling, roiling and morphing in seamless and pleasing rotations and finally taking us close to the moon’s surface.    

Solo flute introduces Long’s attractive and skilfully woven score, violin and clarinet joining in, the sounds gentle, sustained and harmonious, with a tinge of nostalgia. The composer makes nice use of timbres like muted trombone, with fragments of melody, repeated chords and a lyrical viola line. As we get closer to the moon, the music becomes a little whimsical, with a moment of silence before final chords combine in a lovely chorale. Both score and film are intriguing and quirky, working together to offer a charming and gentle experience.

The programme ended with Len Lye’s landmark animated film Tusalava from 1929. The title, the programme note tells us, is a slang word in Samoan meaning “it’s all the same”, evoking the idea of cyclic expression, a feature of several of the films in the programme.

Lye, who spent nearly two years hand-drawing some 4,000 images on black-and-white film, used a split-screen layout and explored the whole screen including its edges. In what was his first film, Lye’s abstract narrative, influenced by both Māori and Aboriginal art, unfolds organically in continuous movement, images dancing and shape-shifting with rhythmic flow. Viewers at its London premiere almost a century ago were intrigued by Lye’s unique modernism and his unusual techniques.

Faleatua’s marvellous new score for Tusalava is inspired by the music and percussion instruments of the Pacific, paté, pa'u and pa'u mango, played in this performance by Isitolo Alesana. Stroma’s musicians joined him on flute, clarinet, piano, strings and percussion, the string sounds slithering like the images on screen, little bouncing ensemble moments, pizzicato bass, melodic cello and clarinet lines, the harmonies jazzy, the rhythms syncopated. Lye’s later popular films like Boogie Doodle and Swinging the Lambeth Walk attest to his strong interest in jazz and blues, and Faleatua has acknowledged this cleverly in his music.

Musician Isitolo Alesana

…his playing of Pacific paté, pa'u and pa'u mango inspired composer Andrew Faleatua, who has created a marvellous new score for Len Lye’s Tusalava

When the Pacific drums join this engaging musical texture, their entry is quiet before building in tempo and presence. They are sometimes in dialogue with the other instruments and eventually front and centre in the music, the rest of the ensemble in accompaniment. The increasing intensity of the images is underlined by the power of the drumming. The composer’s integration of images and music is brilliant, both dancing together, angular musical fragments playing with the visual effects.

In 2007, Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth created a score for Viking Eggeling's abstract 1925 silent film Symphonie Diagonale. Opening with solo trombone, the music is as abstract as the diagonally placed images and shapes of the film. Isolated, quite minimal sounds, a bowed cymbal, a rhythmic burst from electric guitar, sliding strings and winds, echo the dancing movements of geometric shapes on the screen. Sounds and visuals are only loosely synchronised and neither eye nor ear can easily make sense of it all. It ends as it began, shapes slithering back onscreen as the work glides to its conclusion, as it began, with solo trombone.

Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth created a score for

Viking Eggeling's abstract 1925 silent film Symphonie Diagonale

Image supplied

This puzzling work was almost ingratiating in comparison to Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) which followed. Created in 1929 by Spanish/Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel, working with Salvador Dali, it was not hard to believe Buñuel’s statement that the only rule for the script was that "no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted."

The film took us into the brutal, nightmarish world of Surrealism, grotesque metamorphoses on screen, ants crawling out of a hand, a grisly severed hand, and an extraordinary scene in which the male protagonist, abandoning his lecherous pursuit of the female, suddenly seizes two ropes and drags across the room two grand pianos containing dead donkeys, stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, pumpkins, and two priests attached to the ropes. The creators were apparently disappointed by the work’s unexpected popularity when it was premiered.

German composer Iris Ter Schiphorst created a soundtrack for Un Chien Andalou

…a Surrealist film by Luis Buñuel, working with Salvador Dali

In 2009 German composer Iris Ter Schiphorst created a soundtrack for this now iconic modernist film, scored for piccolo trumpet, trombone, cello, e-guitar, piano and two percussionists, and it was this that Stroma played, with their usual clarity of musicianship and attention to detail. With a background in avant garde art and electronic music, Ter Schiphorst was undaunted by the onscreen scenarios of Un Chien Andalou, and has written music as creepy and darkly humorous as the film. Though some in the audience at the Roxy may have been disturbed, the couple beside me calmly continued munching their popcorn, adding to the strange juxtapositions I was absorbing.

Maya Deren’s experimental film from 1943, Meshes of the Afternoon, traps us in a woman’s creepy  nightmare, one heavy with recurring symbols – a flower, a key, a knife impaled in a loaf of bread. Is that black-clad retreating figure the grim reaper? Why is the phone off the hook; what is being played on the phonograph? There’s a sense of anxious movement and pursuit, underlined by the strong and impassioned string quartet score, Adrenaline, by young American composer Feona Lee Jones. The violent death that ends the piece seems inevitable.

Composer Feona Lee Jones

…her string quartet Adrenaline is a coherent and passionate work.

The amplified string quartet, a four-movement piece that can, the composer tells us, stand alone, is perhaps more conventional than the music we’d heard so far. Quasi-tonal, chromatic, dissonant at times, Jones has created a very atmospheric score that reinforces the disturbing, shifting moods of the scenarios on screen; it’s uneasy, restless music, almost hyper-expressive at times. Stroma’s string quartet gave a beautiful performance of what could be, without the frightening visual distractions, a coherent and passionate work.

French artist Marcel Duchamp was originally part of the New York Dada group, and his work Fountain – a urinal he signed R. Mutt and submitted to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit in 1917 – is perhaps the most infamous example of his work. The show committee rejected it as ‘not art’, causing an uproar and Duchamp’s resignation from the Society. Other well-known examples of his “found art”, which he called “Readymades”, were his Bottle Rack and Bicycle Wheel.

Duchamp, as influential and important to 20th century experimental visual art as composer John Cage was to music later in the century, created only one work in film, working with Man Ray and filmmaker Marc Allégret.

His Anémic Cinéma (1926) was related to an interest in what Duchamp called “rotoreliefs”, optical play toys that involved painted designs on flat cardboard circles spun on a phonographic turntable. The film also includes surrealist texts, odd, puzzling, quasi poetic ‘puns’ which also rotate.

Anémic Cinéma

…an image from Cypriot composer and sound artist Yannis Kyriakides’ remake of Marcel Duchamp’s film using “rotoreliefs”

Cypriot composer and sound artist Yannis Kyriakides chose to remake the film in 2013, highlighting what he called the “two polar aspects of cinematic illusion: narrative and animation.” His soundtrack is scored for flute, clarinet, vibraphone, piano, violin, cello, contrabass with electronic soundtrack.

The circling images on screen are quite riveting. The music, including the electronic sounds, is also circling and morphing, sounds of the phonograph needle scratching, quiet sustained piano chords, a work without narrative meaning, like the odd revolving texts – eg Esquivons les ecchymoses des Esquimaux aux trop tirés (“Dodge perverse bruises of Eskimos with exquisite words”). The effect is enigmatic and pleasingly hypnotic.

Stroma’s fascinating ‘Anemic Cinema’ programme was, as always, substantial and carefully curated, and after traversing these adventures in film and music, Tusalava was a marvellous and joyous ending. It reminded us of Lye himself, one of our most individual and extraordinary expatriate artists, while allowing the contemporary sonic expression of Stroma to collaborate powerfully with Pacific musical energy and locating us, the audience, in our own place with all its cultural variety, colour and intensity.

ANEMIC CINEMA Stroma, Hamish McKeich (conductor), in the Lōemis Festival, Roxy Cinema, Wellington June 16, 2025