Film Dada

The most bizarre, entertaining, subversively hilarious short film I’ve seen in this (so far) abbreviated and straitened cinema year has been Ursonate—a dramatized, 24-minute realization of a semimusical performance of Kurt Schwitters’ notorious, Dadaesque 1922–32 sound poem—which was created by the great experimentally minded contemporary violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja (with some help from her friends, as we’ll see below). Ursonate’s premiere took place in May at “Music Never Sleeps,” the livestreamed form of the Dresden Music Festival—a “premiere” that, neither live nor in-person, in a non-space but the real time of a streamed video event, makes a kind of virtual sense for this impossible-topin down hybrid of music, poetry, abstract art, and cinema.

The film itself is indeed cinema, not a recorded performance, but just who constitutes the “filmmaker” here is somewhat unclear. While there is no formal director credit, there is an “idea” credit to Kopatchinskaja, Lukas Fierz (a retired neurologist and former Swiss politician, according to the ), and clarinetist Reto Bieri. The four performers in the film (credited as “acting musicians”) are Kopatchinskaja, Bieri, vocalist Annekatrin Klien, and keyboard player Anthony Romaniuk; and we should also add the film’s photographer and editor Bernard van Hecke, and sound editor Steven Luyckfasseel. Following the author’s written instructions, the performers take Schwitters’ abstract sound poem as if it were a musical score and push the concept as far