A Festival of Music and Colours

The words of Michelangelo, “good painting is music, it is melody”, could serve as an epigraph to the new film of Gorky Television Studio, “Voices and Colours”. The thought of the great artist of the Renaissance seems to find its figurative expression in this film. Here two of the most ancient arts, painting and music, united by the music of the cinema, complement and enrich each other and give birth to an extraordinarily emotional, poetic sound-and-visual image of the world. In the studio’s creative plans the genre of the television film “Voices and Colours” is defined as a film-concert. But this is by no means a concert in our usual sense. Before us is a bright festival of music and colours. Both the form and the content of the work are beauty.

The authors (and besides the screenwriter, director and cameramen, the Chamber Choir and the Boys’ Chapel led by L. K. Sivukhin may rightly be called authors) do not work in the usual sense of the word. They worship the beautiful. They appear before us as good magicians drawing priceless spiritual treasures from the past, both distant and near.

The musical fabric of the film, which takes in works of Russian and foreign classics and Russian folk songs, seems to animate the lines and colours of the canvases of great painters, filling them with living, ringing voices. The music of Mozart, Lotti, Janequin, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Cui and Kasyanov merges organically with the classic images of the creations of Fortin, Boucher, Crespi, Bryullov, Surikov, Vereisky, Malyavin, Makovsky, Levitan, Shishkin, Grabar…

The documentary makers have done enormous work studying the holdings of the Gorky State Art Museum and selecting the musical works. The painted and musical material of the film speaks of refined taste and a poetic perception of life, and conveys the artists’ joyful sense of the world. Colours flash dazzlingly on the screen — now exuberant and generous, now quiet and calm. Their festive profusion combined with wonderful melodies creates a world of astonishing harmony and beauty.

The work of the cameramen is interesting; they make skilful use of panning, which brings the frames to life and opens up new delightful details of the paintings. The camera, and with it we, look attentively now at the magnificent landscapes of Russian nature depicted on the screen, now at the faces of people who lived long ago.

And suddenly the screen is filled with the faces of our contemporaries. They are singers: the Boys’ Choir Chapel and the Chamber Choir. Such a montage of shots creates a sense of a kind of dialogue between eras, of the infinity of the development and perfecting of the world.

Yuri Bespalov’s film seems to argue with those who claim that the abundance of information threatens the person of the 20th century with the danger of being cut off from the past. “Voices and Colours” proves the opposite: true art is immortal, it knows no boundaries, neither of time nor of space; it unites peoples and centuries.

L. Sadovskaya. “Gorkovskaya Pravda”