Be advised portions of the film audio have heavy hissing.
Scores Featured:
Rise And Fall/ Snowstorm / Finale
Film:
www.imdb.com/ti...
Synopsis and account of the film and music:
After a successful expedition to the Himalayas in 1930, of which the documentary Thron der Götter was made, Professor Günter Oskar Dyrenfurth and director Andrew Marton had in mind to produce a dramatic mountain film, a mixture of fiction and documentary. The film tells the story of Norman, an ethnologist, who has in his possession the mask of the mountain demon Kali Mata, a spirit that prevents ordinary mortals from climbing the Himalayan peaks against the will of the gods of Tibet. Norman joins the expedition of Professor Willie (Dyrenfurth in person) and Anna, his fiancee, who remains at home, breaks the spell of the mask by smashing it, thus enabling the expedition to overcome its initial difficulties. Another woman, Ellen, the Professor's wife, eventually saves the climbers from the White Dead. After a terrible storm, for which some shots were taken on the Swiss Jungfraujoch, and the appearance of the demon, Normal collapses and wakes up in the Buddhist monastery of Lamayuru, where in a vision he sees his companions triumphantly reaching the Golden Throne. Marton's subsequent Hollywood career as a second unit director gave him the chance to sell some exterior reels of Der Dämon des Himalaya to Frank Capra for use in his Lost Horizon of 1937 and even to re-use more of the old material in a new Himalayan drama of 1951, Storm Over Tibet or Mask of the Himalaya, in which hit seems that Honegger's music is heard again, with that of Leith Stevens.
The long-lost and recently rediscovered and restored film is now a unique cinematic document because it is the first feature film that was shot directly in the Himalayas (up to 6400 m altitude), Hans Ertl even turned his Bell & Howell to the main summit of Sia Kangri, 7422 m. Likewise, the film contains footage from India and Tibet, from a time long before the emergence of mass tourism,
The score, a real and important discovery, is conceived for large orchestra, without horns, but including two saxophones, Trautonium (Ondes Martenot), piano, harp, percussion and a wordless mixed chorus. The music is "realistic" and experimental for its period, at least as film music, and is built on extended ostinato accompaniments, precursor of today's minimalist techniques, and chromatically dissonant motif-cells.
Later, in 1943, Honegger would write Mermoz, another ambitious film score, similar in style and dramatic impact, making him once more the greatest, if hitherto unjustly neglected, European film composer of the first half of the twentieth century.
6 окт 2024
