Sound and Silence at the Film Music Matinee

Photo: Juho Liukkonen

The 2016 Midnight Sun Film Festival began with a matinee focusing on film music. During the first half of the matinee, British expert Neil Brand led the audience into the history of film music all the way from the Golden Age of Hollywood to the work of modern composers. Brand’s speciality is silent film screenings and he has created a three part BBC series focusing on film music. He was interviewed by Otto Kylmälä and the festival director Timo Malmi.

With the aid of illustrative film excerpts, the matinee focused on topics ranging from the collaborative effort of director and composer to the use of pop songs in cinema since the sixties. There were also examples of films which do not use actual music at all - the most well-known of them being Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1961). Most of all Brand called for the creative use of film music over oversaturation and cliches, and saw possibilities for such creativity with the introduction of new technology and the new rise of independent cinema.

The second half of the matinee consisted of director Mika Kaurismäki and his main composer Anssi Tikanmäki revealing some of the secrets behind their collaboration, which they described as a two-way process; the composer arranges the music to completed film scenes, but on the other hand the composed music may affect the director’s visual storytelling. To illustrate, the duo showed making-of clips from their latest collaboration, the 17th century spectacle The Girl King, which is also part of the festival programme.

To finish the matinee, Kaurismäki and Tikanmäki reminisced on the importance of the Midnight Sun Film Festival’s silent film screenings - those very screenings inspired them to come up with their own silent film Juha (1999) - directed by Aki Kaurismäki -, which is screened in the festival’s Big Tent on saturday with accompanying music by Iiro Rantala.