It’s funny, that statistically speaking, the most comments on this blog is about music. I intentionally put the graphic representation of my Last.fm music profile to the left column, interested it it’ll bring some reaction. It seems that the spankers worldwide have pretty compatible music taste.
Well, not all of them. My Lupus colleague, Honza Žáček, told me, that even pure sight of my playlist constitutes sheer torture for him ;-)
I think that musical portion of movies is very important. In our movies we have used numerous original soudtracks, composed by Johan Bruner. One day I’ll probably make a compilation of the best tracks and publish it.
One of cases when he was able to unleash his creative genius was the Stalin series, or in more general, all the Czechoslovak 50’s series.
I generally like the revolutionary and political songs. Being them communistic, Nazi, whatever. They are strong. They must be, if they can force people to fight and die for ideas expressed within. I experienced that power myself, some ten years ago, when I organized a demonstration and we energized the crowd by music…
There is a song with very eventful history. It was used as anthem by almost anyone – socialists, anarchists, communists, the Soviet Union as well as a rally song by students at the Tianmen Square. The Internationale. The song is 120 years old and of French origin. The original lyrics were written by Eugène Pottier in 1870 and set to music of Pierre De Geyter in 1888. I have found French and Russian version for you.
We have used the Internationale two times in our movies. First it was in The Anarchy, story from The Headmaster’s Study. The left-wing anarchist student’s spirit is unbroken by the birching she endured and at the end of the movie she’s humming the tune in protest, being joined by the Headmaster, who catches the tune saying that’s a nice song.
The darker version is in the Stalin series. Johan rearranged The Internationale so that the energetic song becomes terrifying and implies the dreads induced by the communistic regime who accepted the song as its anthem. He also similarly rearranged various other songs made popular by Czech Communists, with the same result.
I’m now offering you the two soundtracks as free download:
More about roles of music in spanking movies next time.
Current mood: sweaty; Current music: Within Temptation - Caged (album: Within Temptation - Live Tilburg 13-03-02).