4. Documentaries: The White Land of Enderby, Sound: Three Portraits, and Person to Person
1969 - The White Land of Enderby (Enderby Valge Maa)
Following the scandal of Credo, Pärt scored a single film in 1969, the Estonian language black and white documentary The White Land of Enderby, directed by Andres Sööt and Mati Kask. The film, along with 1970's The Ice Kingdom were the product of the Sööt and director Mati Kask's journey to the Antaractic in 1960. Taking its name after the British brothers of whom a portion of Anartica is named, the documentary covers the life and journeys of a Soviet expedition to the area, portrayed through the sympathetic and poetic lens of Sööt, who draws out the drudgery, boredom, and longing in the dangerous but stunningly beautiful land of ice.
The White Land of Enderby forms another step in Pärt's stylistic development in the maturation of his orchestral writing and the poetic simplification of musical material. For his earlier documentaries, such as 1964's Evald Okas, a black and white biography of an Estonian artist, Pärt had experimented with musique-concrete. Making due with a small budget, Pärt turned to the prepared piano, but experimented more broadly with his audio material, creating sounds using microphones, mixing and panning a pre-recorded ensemble of percussion and flute as well as a French pop song within periods of silence, and playing taped material in reverse, creating a disarming musical montage that parallels the surreal disjunction of image and representation in the film's presentation of documentary footage and still photography.
Pärt later uses these montage techniques in stop motion films such as Tuganov's Mouse Hunt (Hiirejaht) in 1964 or The Son of a Crane (Kurepoeg) in 1967 to alter the overall timbre of music to a surreal context, adjust its speed to impossible quickness, or cut off the sound resolutely. For The White Land of Enderby, the composer begins to focus again on the instrumental ensemble, a choice he will increasingly make in later film commissions. Yet Pärt returns to orchestration with the methods of montage in mind. Though instead of mimicking the stop and start of animated characters, Pärt uses the innate drama in orchestral textures and arrangements to serve similar purposes to the sequence and grain of montage. This brings out new elements of instrumentation much like the natural sounds in the Cameraman Kõps series.
In the White Land of Enderby, Pärt begins to use these elements in a sequenced dramatic sense similar to his work in feature film. This can be heard from the beginning, as in the opening segment narrating the tragic story of Robert Scott, an English explorer whose team perished in Antarctica. When the narrator reads their final words, the camera cuts to a dark view up icy crags to the sun: Pärt music begins with a drum roll, then huge chords on the organ, as the camera shows their camp, then the memorial they set up, before the opening credits fade in. The film otherwise is filled with similar dramatic, animated music, such as a drum and low piano sound for a cruising icebreaker, or the huge, complex tone of the organ against bleak images of huge, alien looking machines driving through the icy snow.
Throughout the film, however, Pärt includes more gentle but equally as emotional pieces, including classical-sounding experiments with basic triads, as in a solo piano over long distant shots of the antarctic caravan in a white horizon, then to closeups of their pensive passengers. In these compositions, Pärt continues to match the harmony of the triad with a sense of order slightly different than those of previous film. Whereas in the stop motion films, this order emerged from laws of the natural world, and in The Milkman of Mäeküla from a spiritual one, the order in the documentary is neither entirely from the cold, alien landscape nor the ennui of those on the expeditions, but something in between. Within the film's emotional portrayal of parting and returning from a desolate land, Pärt pairs the suggested resolutions of arpeggiated triads with two characterized voices. More than merely protray the place of an object or even in nature, Pärt combines these metaphors into a narrative signifiying the struggle of two people attempting to find one another within this harmony. This poetic counterpoint, built on separate thematic motifs, plays at three key points of the film. This theme, built on the emotional weight behind images throughout the film, makes special use of vocal mixed with instrumental writing balanced on two interacting, personified melodies.
These motifs are first heard during introductory shots of the team dwarfed by their massive, seemingly endless environment, including a single guitar tracing a series of two ascending minor triads, and a trumpet on a minor melody; the contrast affects a sad desolateness to the images. These scattered elements of the whole figure point out the possibility of harmony within the natural world which, in the eyes of the expedition, remains unfulfilled.
Later, a plane lands in the ice by the camp. The guitar begins with the same figure to a shot of its pilot exiting the plane, then on a line of men waiting in the snow. Instead of finishing, it repeats over matching chords on the organ, as the camera shows men walking around reading white papers. The song pauses from the organ, as the camera cuts to a man reading, the writing visible on a letter from home.
A woman's voice begins to sing the previously sounded trumpet figure, the sound of the men's absent loved ones read through the Antarctic loneliness. The camera cuts away to the men reading letters in the snow, and the song starts again with the woman's voice. Sööt intersperses these with shots of their ships parting from the shore, as the song begins again, though with a man's voice, their two voices meeting in a complex harmony derived from the natural triad.
Figure 5. Members of the expedition reading, followed by the close up on the letter.
When the song starts with both voices in counterpoint, the camera cuts to a single male figure in the ice, and the voices sing together in counterpoint. Yet in the end the song does not resolve. For this scene, the men are only reading letters, and Pärt conveys more of a spiritual and emotional meeting than a physical one. By cutting off the final notes, the composer uses a trick of montage to show that the men and their family's meeting similarly not culminated the first time around. The second time occurs when team members leave the group in Vladivostok, and the camera intersperses shots of them leaving stoney graveyards of their team members with their group photo, underlining the parting of friends, living and dead, and a step on the journey towards home.
This interaction is similarly a ghostly meeting outside of physical reality, rather than this emotional dialogue occuring between people. This takes place in the third and final reiteration, when the musical cues reveal themselves to the viewer as part of a broader narrative that entails not just the departure, but also the return of the expedition home.
After the men are shown on waiting on a ship cutting through clear water, accompanied loosely by a jazz quintet of drum, bass, guitar, and flute. The guitar starts to a shot of a bell, then camera panning into fog; the song begins with the melody men, changed into suits stand waiting. The female voice begins to a shot of ice-broken water: they are returning home. The brief silence of the voices before the organ is filled with a shot, jumping forward in time, of an officer huging his wife: the camera jumps between these reunions and their nervous waiting onboard, different parts of lives, scattered, but unified in a complex counterpoint.
The final duo between the man and the woman's voice, which intertwines but does not resolve, plays over the first shot of the shore, the camera panning from the view of the ship onto the buildings there, then when the music suddenly stops, ending. For the viewer, this final recall of the motifs of alienated nature, resolved in an interaction of male and female voice that creates a moving harmony itself, reveals itself in the essential point of narrative: the ending. The fractured narrative, however, Pärt mirrors in his motivic assembly, elevating the mimetic quality of sound to the level of structure. In reality, the time between the two voices - or the reunion of the expedition with their loved ones - floats, like an ending, between expositions, in a state of timelessness. As the main features of Tintinabulli will coalesce back towards the mimetic metaphor of the bell, Pärt will re-invoke this narrative structure, but spread the movement of time outside of musical timelessness with the essential semantic element of silence.
1972 - Sound: Three Portraits
In 1972, Pärt scored three documentaries, two of which, the thirty-minute experimental Person to Person(Inimeselt inimesele), directed by Rein Maran, the short sports film I Search for Dunes (Otsin luiteid), directed by Hans Roosipuu, and director Olav Neuland's three part-narrative documentary Sound: Three Portraits (Helin: Kolm Portreed). These films are notable due to the composer's writing for jazz ensemble, from which he would late transition back primarily to orchestra in the early seventies for shorts such as 1973's stop motion The Balls (Pallid), or 1974's Sisters (Õed). More than fitting the budget of the alloted film, Pärt's jazz writing furthered this careful structuring of time, in the form of musical rhythm and silence, into an imagistic musical syntax.
Yet the mimetic quality of certain sounds remained, with Pärt selecting the spare evocations of certain instrumental forms and textures in the presentation of emotional effects experienced by characters on screen. Though his music continues to simplify, similar to intertwining of natural triadic moods into emotional harmony through a non-linear narrative structure in The White Land of Enderby, the imaginative mimesis of Pärt's music begins to spread from broader structure into the more basic principles of counterpoint itself, capturing the harmonic symbolism of the natural triad and the emotional dialogue of the two voices within an independent musical system.
Proof of this unifying of resources can be heard in Olav Neuland's probing personal documentary A Sound. After work as a scriptwriter, camera assistant, as well as directing his own student films, Neuland made his debut as writer and director with the three-part, black and white, narrative documentary. The film takes its title from the famous poem of the same title by Juhan Liiv, read in the beginning of the film, in which the "sound" (heli) of early life is extinguished for the narrator: "When I was small, / a sound rang in my breast. And as I grew, the sound in my breast gained force..." (Liiv, 2013). Following the narrator of the poem, who describe his coming of age as the gradual muffling of a small "sound" he heard within himself as a child, A Sound follows three aging men, meditating on their work and former ambitions.
Pärt had already covered the life of working people in a similar manner in 1966's Reportage According to the Telephone Book, directed by Virve Koppel and Mati Jüri-Põldre. The first, largely experimental documentary is framed around the concept of interviewing various Esotnians with the surname Sepp (smith), includng an actual smith, a baker, Heino Sepp, the artist Aino Tõnnisson-Spp, the pianist Heljo Sepp, as well as the composer Kuldar Sink, whose piece for piano is featured as a performance by Heljo Sepp.[1] For this film, Pärt employs a creative method similar to his first documentary on Evald Okas by taking the germ for his film-music from a sound which embodies the film's subject, that being the clinking sound of the smith's hammer. Aside from the interview segments, Pärt's writes primarily behind montages, beginning with one of the metal work around Tallinn, then in other artistic sequences highlighting the physical and visual nature of metal work, first portraits of coins which are smelted and smithed, then later of clocks throughout Tallinn and their inner workings. In a fascinating mix of avant-guarde and classical techniques, Pärt illustrates the metaphorical "coining" of music and image in his score for a scene in which the smith is seen working, literally smelting and remolding the elements of sound back into music.
Though the subject in A Sound is somewhat similar to these portions of Reportage, Pärt's approach in 1972 is radically different than that of 1966, just as the subject of the film is far less playful and didactic than it is existential and personal. For A Sound, Neuland handles people in a more modernist fashion, intercutting documentary film of everday life, interview audio with the subjects, and creative staging of scenes. Rather than present them head one, Neuland assembles these documents together in an attempt to portray the inner life of three Estonians. These are, in order of the segments: Toomas Enke the Metal Worker (Lukksepp Toomas Enke), Captain Herman Tõnisssoo (Kapten Herman Tõnissoo), and Ferdinand Laaser the Gardner (Aednik Ferdinand Laaser).
Pärt's score consists of short pieces, arranged in groupings according to the separate chapters, in addition to a duet for flute and electric guitar, which plays during the opening credits. This duet, in fact, is linked with third and final segment. This is the only music that accompanies, Laaser the gardener, an ageing, Thoreau-like figure, with whom the filmmakers frankly discuss work and death. Neuland chooses to highlight Laaser's deep and abiding love of nature, as when he compares the roses to singers giving their song, or even stating that "roses have left the deepest impression on my life." In one scene, he sits down, and begins singing a folk song which Pärt takes up in solo guitar building near the end of the film over shots of his separate roses.
When the music finishes, we see Laas, who standing beside a bed of flowers. He narrates how he had always attempted to grow a black rose, but was finally disappointed when it grew: showing the black rose in frame, the flute begins on the solo melody. This wistful song carries the primary motif of the film, a link between the fateful "sound" decried by the narrator in Liiv's poem, and similar representatives in the objects of the three subject's lives; in this case, a rose. Where Laas' life and aging are tied to nature, the second subject Tõnissoo, a former sea captain, is tied to the sea. For this segment Pärt uses a more expansive, dissonant palate, similar to the tonal landscapes of Perpetuum Mobiil, as well as further variations on strings similar to those written later for Rein Maran's Person to Person. These emotional studies on the strings,
limited but expressive variations of melodies and rhythms stated in the opening cacophony, create an air of unspoken danger and anxiety behind the calm nostalgia of the boats, digging deeper into the captain's reserved personality and his adventurous history.
Using far more simple means, however, Pärt penetrates perhaps further into the inner world of the film's first subject, a man who relates not to nature or the sea, but to the dark and lonely streets of the city. The metal worker Toomas Enke lives in Tallinn, where he produces and repairs intricate metal objects, such as weathervanes and lampposts. Despite the anonymous aspect of his work, Enke is a sensitive, soft-spoken person, a lover of Schubert, who, we come to find, aspired to be an artist before the Second World War but took up metalwork afterwards to make a living.
Importantly, Pärt chooses to portray Enke's isolated soul with a single instrument, the violin, from which he draws a virtuosic spectrum of emotion in the various colors and methods of the stringed instrument, or solemnly breaking silence with scurrying scratches or melodies. The violin carries the voice of the individual in a representative fashion not only in its voice-like quality and range of timbral effect, but in Pärt's poetic casting, in its ability to cross from single-line melodies into divisions of two notes, one held as a constant peddle point against another, moving melody, and even to spread into triads and full chords. In this manner, Pärt further reconstitutes the elements of Tintinabulli into a single instrument, focusing the metaphoric harmony of the triad, the philosophical dialogue of the two melodies, and the structure of silence into a single human soul.
This metaphor can be observed from the film's exposition. After opening with a night shot of one of Enke's lamps, the camera shows Enke climbing down a roof in Tallinn, then walking through the crowded city. Pärt writes as he does in stop motions films to fill Enke's motion, with a climbing and descending scale, but dips into a rich chord as Enke climbs down, and the camera cuts to him walking through the city, the violin following his figure in outward singularity and inner intricacy.
This emotionally penetrating music, built from widely spaced melodies mixed with harmonic double stops and chords, plays at key points during the portion of the film, which intercuts shots of Enke in his workshop and at leisure, along with an interview close up to his face, of which the audio is played over other images. As he explains his work over these images, the violin plays spare pizzicato arpeggios, noting the peace that emerges from his relationship to his work.
Later, the camera cuts to night, as Enke makes his way from out of the crowd into an alley, the violin sharply and suddenly switching to soft and sudden figures softly bowing, and plucking, broken by silence. This silence, matched to the black darkness of the alley, takes on further meaning as his voice over continues:
"People say, that one needs peace and silence. Of course, I can't get a vacation," his voice speaks as he walks into the black pit of a dark alley, lit by a feeble lamp: "But for me, its the opposite. I don't like silence. Sometimes my wife takes me walking in the forest. And the forest is beautiful, I don't have anything against beauty. The birds sing, the bees buzz, so many flowers, every kind of color." He descends into a basement lit by one of his lamps, which he lights more fully, the violin plucking descending figures "But I am horrified. A feeling, like something under my skin. Silence, that is my death."
In the meantime, Pärt has managed to convey this silence, which like portions of linear narrative in The White Land of Enderby, break up the timeless personal space presented by the documentary portrait. This scene, however, brings a new meaning out of silence not apparent in the literal image on the screen, but through Anke's description, the evocation of an image behind this, that of another kind of nature. Unlike the lawful nature symbolized by the triad, this experienced nature does not represent life, but death. This death must be distinguished from that which encountered in Tõnu's final moments in The Milkman of Mäeküla. There, the protagonist's vision imbues his final moments with a form of religious redemption, uniting his spirit with that of nature. Here, Anke is fearing what lies beyond the possibility of that resolution, and in Pärt's imagination, what can only be the soundlessness that follows it.
Neuland does not leave the meaning of this silence fixed, however. As the scene continues, the intermittent plucking continues as he works, but when the camera turns to his handiwork, once he has walked away to something else, it turns into a graceful minor-key melody, returning to the film's primary motif- the lamp - as an artistic work from which derives the artist's sense of order and purpose. This theme plays sparsely when the artist is interviewed walking through an empty building, discussing his feelings on music itself. We see him walk down a pair of stairs, and a title cue is brought up which states that the building was turned into a club using his lamps, the pop music of the club already playing, the camera cutting to a black shot, which lightens to the finished club. The camera raises from the crowd of young people to the lamps, the singers' music filling the mix then suddenly cutting out. As the camera freezes, a ticking is heard, and his words repeat: "Silence, that is my death."
Figure 6: The lamps Enke gifted to the music venue.
Neuland here points to another kind of silence, the silence of Enke's anonymity in beautiful work which nevertheless goes unnoticed, creating another reference to the artist himself, whose rich inner life, going into his handiwork, also goes unheard in the din of the crowd.
These sentiments are reaffirmed in the final segment. Enke, facing the camera in a close up, explains this himself, saying that he puts all of himself into his work, which goes to the city, saying in another close-up interview, "I have my own goal. I search for beauty." With these words, the music builds in volume, the camera cuts back to a lone lamp in an arch, drawing back to show the silhouettes of passerby in the cold night. However, instead of a single instrument, there is a duet, a second violin answers the descending melody of the first, joining in sob-like double stops.
Figure 7. The final shot of "Toomas Enke the Metal Worker," filmed in Tallinn's old town.
Thus the viewer now sees the beauty of the lamp, focused in the first scene with the solo violin, modified by the spirit of the artist, the second melody, both combining into the internal drama within the object. Pärt reuses the symbolic interaction of two voices, but rather than pattern their interaction as that between different people, he focuses their meaning into different aspects of the same individual. The interprative connection with the composer comes from Enke's task as an anonymous artist, who infuses part of himself into and object, and the object, which in turn comes to embody the artists' being in the world.
This interaction, between objectivity and subjectivity, sound and silence, differs from that of his earlier animated films, where, for example, musical mimesis aligns with gesture but does not convey its inner meaning. Beginning with A Sound, this begins to change. In later films, such as 1973's emotionally probing The Balls, this duality comes to the fore in an emotional fable
played in colored balls. Their character and emotions are protrayed minimally, through the expressive paintings of their faces and slight movements, moving closer to an innocent game of childish imagination with real objects. This trick becomes a key to the emotional force of the film, which constracts the distance between perception and belief, inanimcacy or objecthood on one hand, and subjectivity, and life, on the other.
With Toomas Enke, the two voices begin to split along these lines of representation. From the standpoint of Pärt the artist, protraying another artist, Enke, the analogy between the light of Enke's lamp, and the sparkling texture of the violin, further opens the door to a conception of music that might capture how the subjective life of a human artist can be unified with the objective silence of the world.
[1] The addition of Sink, who is himself interviewed by the host Rein Karamäe along wth Heljo Sepp, adds the opinion of another composer to the film. Sink, who studied music theory and flute at Tallinn university along with Pärt, belonged to the composers union, in addition to the cadre of contemporary artists with which Pärt socialized during his formative years, and likely had his own effect on the composer. "Kuldar was a true genius," Pärt has said of Sink, "I think the most gifted Estonian composer of all time."
(https://arhiiv.err.ee/vaata/mees-kes-teadis-saladust-kuldar-sink)
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