Last week I saw Eisenstein's Strike (1924) screened at Toronto's Gladstone Hotel as part of Early Monthly Segments' celebration of Worker's month. Given the global age of austerity we are now entering the choice couldn't of been more apposite. The film was accompanied by a live score performed by Canadian composer and experiemental muscian Allison Cameron. Cameron used a range of different instruments and sound making machines – guitar, thumb piano, effects pedal, record player, wireless radio – to create a sparse and abstract sound world - isolated notes pierced unevenly textured sheets of radio static and a broken record skipped relentlessly, its pops and crackles repeating in a rhythmical pattern that partially masked the original orchestral content. This foreboding mechanical monotony, which drove the piece forward, was accentuated by something beyond Cameron’s control - the basso continuo for the entire work was the film projector's whir. Its light, flitting drone underscored the haunted feeling evoked by the music.The music didn’t take on the scene’s rhythms or express its emotional core. There were accidental points of convergence where sound met vision; moments where that heard could conceivably have been the sound of events seen. But for the most part the score was, in Michel Chion's term, anemapathetic, meaning it proceeded, like the broken record and vintage projector, ineluctably, undaunted and almost oblivious to the film’s unfolding narrative. There’s a dramatic scene early on in the picture: a factory machinist is wrongly accused of stealing a company micrometre. The cost of replacing the lost tool, which management cruely demands, stands to financially ruin him. His shame in unfairly shouldering this accusation and his frustration and anger at not being believed were almost unbearably intense emotions to share. This unusually ferocious intensity was, I would argue, the result of Cameron’s skilful positioning of the scene against a backdrop of profound sonic indifference. This is for me where the power of her score lay – it made you feel more strongly.
