Arsenal

The madness of war

Exactly one hundred years after the October Revolution in Russia, Eric Sleichim and BL!NDMAN [strings] are presenting a new sound score to the legendary film Arsenal by director Alexander Dovzhenko, which they will perform live. The film is set in the Ukrainian capital Kiev. It is early 1918 and a group of soldiers are returning to the front during the Great War when they find themselves in a civil war between the Bolsheviks and nationalists. Some of the soldiers side with the Bolsheviks. They use a munitions factory as a base for their violent struggle that engulfs all of Ukraine. Apart from paying tribute to the Bolshevik revolution, the film is primarily an indictment of the madness of war. Along with Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Arsenal is rightly considered to be one of the revolutionary masterpieces of Soviet cinema. BL!NDMAN [strings] accompany Dovzhenko’s impressive visual poem with fragments and quotes from artists like Sjostakovitsj, Ligeti, Ravel, Berio Pärt, and Hosokawa.