Projects / Geheimnisse einer Seele

with the One.Night.Band
Artistic Directors Mia Zabelka, Zahra Mani and Mia Makela

The Austrian director G.W. Pabst's silent film "Geheimnisse einer Seele" (The Secrets of a Soul) is based on one of Sigmund Freud's case studies. It was the first film that addressed psychoanalysis and combines abstract and surreal dream sequences with scenes from an everyday bourgeois world. The film grows out of this tension between two mutually exclusive worlds, which each threaten the existence of the other. The story and structure of the film provide a good starting point for music that exists in the on the boundaries between contemporary composed and improvised music.

The video score, which Mia Makela will play live during the performance, consists of complex images of people and animals, objects, places and sceneries from the original silent film.

The visuals fulfil the function of a score for the one.night.band musicians, who as a sound body reflect the conscious and subconscious complexity of human existence, where the whole consists of individual parts, each complete, in some way self-contained yet always interactive and interdependent on the other elements. The essence of the ensemble lies in each individual member's personal contributions to the sound, each individual background, thought process and way of playing. The unique character of the event and the piece is a summation of opposites uniting in a common sound, contrasts playing together, listening and looking and reacting to one another in an ongoing creative process.

The complexity of the graphic material contributes to the psychological and visual complexity of the performance as whole, which merges the unmistakable aesthetics of expressionist silent film with the experimental adventures of contemporary sound and moving image composition and performance.