The Eternal Return (performance view), The Sori New Music Ensemble, (Changwon Park, conductor), Seoul, Korea, 2003.
Friedrich Nietzsche elaborated his theory of eternal return, or eternal recurrence, in several texts. The Will to Power argued that a limited and calculable number of combinations exist in infinite time. Those combinations repeat an infinite number of times, and between iterations of individual events all other combinations must take place. 'The world,' Nietzsche concluded, '[is] a circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its dice game ad infinitum.'
Human existence also falls subject to this principle of eternal return, as reasoned in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The itinerant philosopher Zarathustra receives a mountaintop vision of the eternal return. 'I shall return, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent-not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life, in the greatest things and in the smallest.' Mankind remains trapped in this circular existence. Thus condemned to repeat perpetually his errors, man never achieves the elevated status of Übermensch, or superman.
This pessimistic, dissonant, and hopeless understanding of the human condition has provided the subject the multimedia collage The Eternal Return, while Nietzsche's theory of reiteration has inspired its cyclical structure. This integrally conceived project joins five film clips selected and manipulated by filmmaker Matt Marello with five musical compositions by C.P. First. Film extracts are looped and projected onto four separate screens while the instrumental ensembles perform live. Marello has digitally replaced the original actors in each film with his own image. As sole protagonist, the filmmaker himself provides the unifying onscreen element in this ten-minute collage.
Two visual planes interact contrapuntally in The Eternal Return. A short segment from the silent sci-fi classic Metropolis (1926) repeats, like a pictorial ostinato, as a representation of infinite time. The four remaining film loops entrap the protagonist in an eternal fugue of menacing, inescapable predicaments. Our protagonist waits endlessly for someone to arrive in the first excerpt from Alfred Hitchcock's romantic comedy-thriller, North by Northwest (1959). The inaugural episode of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone ("Where Is Everybody?" 1959) contributes material for the frightening isolation and futility portrayed in the second clip. Hitchcock-style foreboding enters in the third film loop from Psycho (1960), as the protagonist drives through an eternal night, unable to reach his destination. The wretched character endures accusing glances in a scene from Orson Welles's little-known film The Trial (1963), an adaptation of Franz Kafka's Der Prozess.
C.P. First has provided an original score for four independent instrumental ensembles and prerecorded tape. In a manner comparable to the video, the score combines sound clips derived from the original movie soundtracks with autobiographical sound images, i.e. quotations from his own compositions. Two violins accompany the invariable "spinning room" video. A piano trio, borrowing periodically from First's composition Intimate Voices, provides a counterpoint to North by Northwest. An ensemble of oboe, amplified nylon string guitar, and electronic drums contributes a backdrop to the Twilight Zone excerpt. The most extensive quotation occurs during the Psycho clip. Bernard Herrmann's music for North by Northwest and Psycho and First's Time's Dedication, and its relentless cantillation of the French word "horlage" (clock), offered raw material for the prerecorded tape. Music for brass trio (trumpet, horn, and euphonium) and percussion underscores The Trial. The Eternal Return depicts the absurdity and anxiety of contemporary existence via a unified visual, aural, and philosophical construction. Of all the characters in the five source movies, it is, ironically, the deranged Norman Bates in Psycho who seems to grasp the futility of human existence that Nietzsche articulated less than a century before. "You know what I think?" asks Norman. "I think that we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge and inch."
© Todd E. Sullivan (Terre Haute, 2003)
Matt Marello, The Eternal Return (Twilight Zone), video, endless loop, 0:42 (excerpt).
Human existence also falls subject to this principle of eternal return, as reasoned in Thus Spake Zarathustra. The itinerant philosopher Zarathustra receives a mountaintop vision of the eternal return. 'I shall return, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent-not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life, in the greatest things and in the smallest.' Mankind remains trapped in this circular existence. Thus condemned to repeat perpetually his errors, man never achieves the elevated status of Übermensch, or superman.
This pessimistic, dissonant, and hopeless understanding of the human condition has provided the subject the multimedia collage The Eternal Return, while Nietzsche's theory of reiteration has inspired its cyclical structure. This integrally conceived project joins five film clips selected and manipulated by filmmaker Matt Marello with five musical compositions by C.P. First. Film extracts are looped and projected onto four separate screens while the instrumental ensembles perform live. Marello has digitally replaced the original actors in each film with his own image. As sole protagonist, the filmmaker himself provides the unifying onscreen element in this ten-minute collage.
Two visual planes interact contrapuntally in The Eternal Return. A short segment from the silent sci-fi classic Metropolis (1926) repeats, like a pictorial ostinato, as a representation of infinite time. The four remaining film loops entrap the protagonist in an eternal fugue of menacing, inescapable predicaments. Our protagonist waits endlessly for someone to arrive in the first excerpt from Alfred Hitchcock's romantic comedy-thriller, North by Northwest (1959). The inaugural episode of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone ("Where Is Everybody?" 1959) contributes material for the frightening isolation and futility portrayed in the second clip. Hitchcock-style foreboding enters in the third film loop from Psycho (1960), as the protagonist drives through an eternal night, unable to reach his destination. The wretched character endures accusing glances in a scene from Orson Welles's little-known film The Trial (1963), an adaptation of Franz Kafka's Der Prozess.
C.P. First has provided an original score for four independent instrumental ensembles and prerecorded tape. In a manner comparable to the video, the score combines sound clips derived from the original movie soundtracks with autobiographical sound images, i.e. quotations from his own compositions. Two violins accompany the invariable "spinning room" video. A piano trio, borrowing periodically from First's composition Intimate Voices, provides a counterpoint to North by Northwest. An ensemble of oboe, amplified nylon string guitar, and electronic drums contributes a backdrop to the Twilight Zone excerpt. The most extensive quotation occurs during the Psycho clip. Bernard Herrmann's music for North by Northwest and Psycho and First's Time's Dedication, and its relentless cantillation of the French word "horlage" (clock), offered raw material for the prerecorded tape. Music for brass trio (trumpet, horn, and euphonium) and percussion underscores The Trial. The Eternal Return depicts the absurdity and anxiety of contemporary existence via a unified visual, aural, and philosophical construction. Of all the characters in the five source movies, it is, ironically, the deranged Norman Bates in Psycho who seems to grasp the futility of human existence that Nietzsche articulated less than a century before. "You know what I think?" asks Norman. "I think that we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge and inch."
© Todd E. Sullivan (Terre Haute, 2003)
Matt Marello, The Eternal Return (Twilight Zone), video, endless loop, 0:42 (excerpt).
