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FILM USES MILITARY INFRARED TECHNOLOGY TO HIGHLIGHT BEAUTY & FRAGILITY AMIDST GROWING GLOBAL TENSION
11 FEBRUARY 2020 (TORONTO, ON)--BAFTA-winning film-maker Yulia Mahr is to reveal her new video for "Vladimir’s Blues", from Max Richter’s Deutsche Grammophon/Universal Music Canada, the country's leading music company album The Blue Notebooks. The film is an artistic response to escalating global tension. Yulia Mahr’s take on Vladimir’s Blues
receives its official YouTube global premiere on 11 February 2020 (11am
EST/5pm CET), immediately preceded by a 30-minute live chat between
Mahr and Richter.
"Vladimir’s Blues" is about fragile beauty and the power of small
things to elevate our everyday experience. Yulia Mahr’s short film
unlocks the positive power of a technology originally developed for
surveillance and military purposes. She essentially subverts that
purpose, using thermal imaging cameras – which transform infrared
radiation (heat) into visible images – in a creative context to shape a
narrative about a composition and the inspiration behind it.
"Vladimir’s Blues" has so far scored over 105 million streams to become Max Richter’s No.1 streaming track. The Blue Notebooks
was not only a protest album, but meditation on violence in general,
and particularly the violence that Richter experienced around him as a
child. Richter had an unhappy childhood, which he would escape through
music, literature and a love and fascination for beautiful things –
especially butterflies. In "Vladimir’s Blues", Mahr poignantly
highlights Richter’s story of a lost child escaping into music. The
piece also leans on Mahr’s own difficult childhood.
The artistry of the finished product belies the huge number of
challenges involved in using instruments designed for military and
industrial applications. “The cameras are unwieldy and cumbersome … They
interrupt filming every 15 seconds or so … One small movement pulls you
out of focus …” – as Mahr explains, the list of difficulties goes on
and on.
It was the message of peace inherent in The Blue Notebooks,
which began life in 2003 as Richter’s personal protest against the Iraq
War, that led Mahr to explore the creative possibilities of thermal
imaging. “I wondered about this technology of war and surveillance, and
whether I could disrupt its intention to create something positive, that
speaks very much of individual experience,” she recalls. And in her
hands, a technology that routinely dehumanizes is transformed into a
vehicle for expressing our shared humanity.
“There is a strange beauty inherent in this imagery, a beauty that is
deeply tarnished by associations with migrants hiding, and dying, in
refrigerated lorries to evade detection by this very same technology.
Would it be possible to claim this imagery for something hopeful, as
Max’s music does?” This was the question Mahr asked herself as she set
out to produce her profoundly moving film. “Slowly a thing of beauty
began to evolve. Most beautiful of all was the discovery that the heat
traces we leave as we move around can tell our stories, and the story of
a piece of music and how it unfolds. A legacy that says, ‘we were here
and we count’.”
Richter and Mahr have worked together for over 25 years as part of
Studio Richter Mahr, a collaborative home for their creative projects.
At its core is the belief that creativity exists as a social project
that can illuminate the lives of individuals and society as a whole, and
that art exists beyond all boundaries. The duo recently collaborated on
SLEEP, followed by a documentary on the project, which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim.
