On Wednesday 10 July, in Forlì at the Arena della Rocca di Caterina Sforza there will be a screening of the masterpiece Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang, with the electroacoustic soundtrack performed live by Edison Studio, the collective of composers-musicians founded by Alessandro Cipriani , Mauro Cardi, Luigi Ceccarelli joined by Vincenzo Core and Andrea Veneri. The concert screening is organized by the Seismic Area Association as part of “ARENA ROCCA ESTATE 2024” the summer festival of the Municipality of Forlì.
What will be heard during the evening is a new original soundtrack, composed in 2023 by Edison Studio, for what is considered the most visionary of silent films and a masterpiece of expressionist and science fiction cinema.
The film, presented here in its most complete version ever found, the result of refined restoration work by the Alpha-Omega Digital GmbH laboratory in Munich, has been enriched by a composition that combines vocal, instrumental, mechanical, electronic and environmental sounds , orchestrated and transformed live with contemporary technologies.
Edison Studio’s music does not simply support the film, but expands it by reinterpreting its symbolic and dramaturgical implications. Through a collaborative process, the collective created an immersive and layered soundtrack, which intertwines with the film’s narrative, offering a new audiovisual dimension and paying homage to the futuristic and poetic character of Lang’s work.
This new soundtrack follows the different settings of the film whose events were imagined to take place in the 2020s: the metropolis above, the upper city of the rich inspired by futurist architectural models, with its eternal gardens and pleasure house; the metropolis below, the dark city of the workers located underground, but also the catacombs and of course the factory.
Edison Studio is a collective of composers founded in Rome in 1993 by Mauro Cardi, Luigi Ceccarelli, Fabio Cifariello Ciardi and Alessandro Cipriani with the aim of combining personal creative and productive skills for the creation of musical works in relation to the visual arts and through the live performance. Since 1993, Edison Studio’s productions have been commissioned by numerous international festivals (ICMC Singapore, Ravenna Festival, Redcat Los Angeles, Union of Russian Composers) and performed live by the authors themselves using the most innovative electroacoustic techniques in both musical creation and production of concerts. One of the most significant activities of Edison Studio is dedicated to the creation and live performance of electroacoustic soundtracks for silent films of the 1910s and 1920s, including 4 silent masterpieces, in addition to Alfred Hitchcock’s Metropolis: Blackmail; Inferno, the first Italian feature film, about Dante’s infernal journey, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari the “cult” film of German expressionism, and Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece.
