Film Design

3. SPECIFIC PLAYLISTS*

*Here new short films by Zachàr Laskewicz are presented in a coherent form as a collection of films or as playlists.

1. Zachàr Playlisted by Laskewicz

10 of my best films played in my own favourite order.

2. The Complete 'Zvotšlipas Umatšlipit'

This playlist contains the current version of the most up-to-date recordings yet uploaded of all 10 short films used in the film 'Zvotšlipas Umatšlipit'.

This series of what appear shorter films is curious in that it uses as its narrative base the primary plane of a fictive language known as 'Dišprikfot' (referred to in English as Disfodish or simply Fodish). A language lesson is seen unfolding or revealing its contents in a literal sense. The viewer is intended from the beginning to feel a sense of the strange and the distant. From the very beginning it makes references to film-styles that are no longer in use, and the viewer can work out pretty quickly fact that it’s not going to be an ‘easy’ set of narrative strategies – the language is unfamiliar, largely redundant to the viewer who has ‘missed’ the first 26 lessons, at least according to the information provided on-screen. This implies a lot of linguistic and musical suggestion from tone and style, but it soon grapples at the border of the language lesson as well as the dancer and the piano-player become involved in the retelling of the tale. What is perhaps more unusual is the fact that the protagonists are responsible for teaching this language to the audience, but at the same time to be trapped within its limitations; they don't seem to realise the superficiality of their existence. ‘Zvotšlipas Umatšlipit’ is a tragic tale; one that tells itself through a language lesson; the ‘silent’ film (accompanied only by piano music) that grows almost organically at the end of the film using the vocabulary built up in the development, contains the tragic realisation of that lesson – that the life of Aleksandriš Gänän became insufferable, another Incessant Cycle. This film, however, is structured thanks to the musical forces behind the solo piano composition The Painstaking Cycle. And this cycle is one of Seven Incessant Cycles for piano compositions, which will in turn become films (to accompany fictive language courses to the fictive language Disfodish) which explore other insights into existential insights into reality, stretching from the tragic to the extremely joyful.

3. The Complete 'Zachàr Plays Glass'

A recital of the 9 dynamic short films which together form the complete contents of the DVD 'Zachàr Plays Glass'.

4. The METAMORPHOSIS Compositions

This playlist contains a complete consecutive cycling through the compositions which together form the 'METAMORPHOSIS' piano solos by Philip Glass.

The Music-Theatre Film versions of Glass' Metamorphosis One to Five are the highlight of the ZACHAR PLAYS GLASS DVD. It is a recording of choreographed and cinematially edited performances and is not the first time I've attempted to combine movement into my own musical expression (being the major theme of preceding music-theatre works, particularly ZAUM [1993]). The compositions in the Glass collection are indeed my own personal realisation of my instinctive theory about the nature of musicality. The Metamorphosis pieces are intricately related to one another; the music combined with the visual interpretation of the performance 'metamorphose' in a number of fashions and on a number of different levels. Between the first and the fifth, a bridge is made between the extreme formalization of movement inherent in (for example) certain forms of Asian dance and its opposing pole, an exaggerated extroversion (parodying western romanticism) that passes through various levels of development. An important recurring metaphor is the recurring symbol of clocks turning at different speeds to demonstrate firstly particular points of musical development but mainly to show how music can influence the way we experience temporality. Other points of development along the journey include the gradual ageing of the performer (hair colour and make-up), and the exhaustion which corresponds to having done really hard work. I've since found more, such as the way the movements often echo the movement of the clock, such as the stylised conductor in Metamorphosis One and the tired convulsions behind and over in Metamorphosis Five. It is also a highly personal comment on the way I feel about myself and my relationship with reality, but that's a more complex matter. The music, of course, remains copyright to Philip Glass himself; the piano choreography (not as easy as it looks), the dance, the design and the film itself, remains copyright to me (Writer Full Member of APRA).

5. Zachàr Plays Glass INTRODUCTION

A set of selections from the DVD 'Zachàr Plays Glass' which is intended to provide an introduction to the various visual and musical themes made use of, recurring images and ideas which consolidate the idea of the essential relationship between music, time and our inability to control the way they influence us.

6. Zachàr Plays Himself - selection

A selection from the SVCD - soon to be rereleased as a DVD - which presents works composed and performed by Laskewicz for the solo piano.

7. Zachàr Plays Piano - playlist

These are early recordings of piano music composed by various composers and taken from the first SVCD films made. What makes these works interesting is that the reason I play them is because of the unique movements required to be used by the performer; the composer shows his or her awareness of what the piano player is doing, particularly clear in works such as Debussy's Cakewalk 'le petit negre' and most works by Bartok in the Makrokosmos piano books.