Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Low Down
A quirky, informative and educational piece of what’s as much performance art as it is a comedic piece as it is a lecture, turning the question of what you might think that music actually is upside down and back to front. Music is the signature of a film, its skin if you like. This clever piece shows how it has a material influence on how any cinematic action will be interpreted by its audience.
Review
It’s the dying embers of the Fringe here in the splendid surroundings of the French Institute for Scotland, where “l’Oeil et l’Oreille” (the literal translation of which is “The Eye and The Ear” but which has morphed into “All Eyes and Ears” for a catchier Fringe title) promises to show how music is the signature of any film, its skin if you like, and that it has a material influence on how the cinematic action is interpreted by its audience.
This is a quirky, informative and educational piece of what’s as much performance art as it is a comedic piece as it is a lecture, turning the question of what you might think that music actually is upside down and back to front. Jean-François Hoël and Hervé Mabille provide live music on stage as accompaniment to a series of short movies from filmmaker Christine François, each of which has been beautifully created, starring our two musicians in various roles. Each film stands on its own whilst elements from several are cleverly woven into an amusing denouement to round off seventy-five minutes of quite different Fringe entertainment.
The central premise is easy – show the same film twice but change the accompanying music and it’s like watching a different film. Mabille and Hoël accompany each silent movie live, with the former focusing on keyboards (but with a neat bit of sax playing in one piece) and the technical side of the show leaving Hoël to demonstrate the musical potential of a range of everyday objects you wouldn’t think had the potential to produce anything, never mind something tuneful.
Sonata for garden hose anyone? Pink Panther theme on the watering can? Bit of James Bond music on a long handled dustpan? Even letting the air out of a balloon can, in the right hands, help create a film soundscape. And there’s more. Lots more!
Hoël is the brains behind the extraordinary collection of musical instruments littering the stage, each of which has been rescued from the bin and successfully recycled into its new, starring role.
And, the funny thing is, their central premise is bang on. Playing something dark and haunting turns a film we’d seen a minute earlier that depicted an uplifting reunion between two friends into something resembling a Putin stooge hunting down its prey. Chilling.
Then there’s a film where a man enters, sits and opens a suitcase. But what’s in it? We’re given a choice of six objects as the film goes onto loop and the on stage duo run through a series of alternative accompaniments. We’re some way through the show at this point so it’s perhaps hardly surprising that the audience nail it each time, suggesting that the next time any of us rock up to a cinema, we’re going to watch the action unfold in a way we have never done before.
Brilliantly wacky, inventive, absurd and at times plain bonkers, this is one of those wonderfully quirky shows that educates by osmosis, leaving you happier and wiser at its clever conclusion. Superbement divertissant!
