Chaplin AV

From April 16 to May 19, the cinemas “Zvezda”, “Youth” and “Cosmos” are demonstrations of the famous dumb comedies Charlie Chaplin for live voice acting of Russian electronic musicians (see schedule on the site ). We asked the participants of the Chaplin AV project to tell about our attitude to the films of the great actor and director and about their soundtracks.

The music of the St. Petersburg composer and Bitmeaker Georgy Kotunov was influenced by jazz, classic trip-hop, abstract hip-hop and IDM with records of the Ninja Tune and Warp labels. His recent Darkly album, published at the end of last year, is a harmonious union of neoclassica and downtempo, instrumental plays with melancholy melodies in the scenery of an elegant broken bat, unexpected samples and a delicate glue.

About Charlie Chaplin

Chaplin is a genius. He is, of course, a brilliant director and actor. His approach to creating paintings is simply amazing. The way he worked on each individual scene, how he worked out each frame and how later these amazing films were formed from these several scenes, which still want to watch and review, this cannot but inspire! And, of course, it seems to me, his main achievement is the creation of his image of a tramp. Human and spiritual qualities embedded in him, not allowing him to give up even in the most hopeless situations, simplicity and love of life in any of its manifestations, the courage and selflessness of a small person - this is what will always attract the attention of the viewer and what we lack in life.

About your living soundtrack

The idea is to process jazz in the 30s and 40s. According to my sensations, the sound texture of these records is very harmoniously combined with the picture. I just took records with this music, sampled some pieces I needed and created an audio track on this basis for each individual scene from the film, somewhere adding the missing parties on their instruments, and somewhere completely limited to this texture.

Long ARM voices Circus (1928)
"Youth", April 16, 19:45