Berlin Horse

A first version of Berlin Horse (1970) that Malcom Le Grice did not much like had already been made and then edited over different tracks of white noise. It is finally with the music of Brian Eno that the film finds its definitive form. Malcom Le Grice had already made the film and Brian Eno the soundtrack; the two elements were simply put together and it worked immediately, in a perfectly complementary way. The looping of the sound does not match the looping of the image, and yet the audiovisual magnetism works wonderfully.

The audiovisual elements come from various samples: for the image, there are two distinct sequences whose common point is the figure of the horse. The first, in which the animal gallops in a stall, is an original take filmed in 8mm and then refilmed in 16mm at different speeds and from different angles; the second, in which horses are led out of a burning barn, comes from an early film (Edison). The colour treatment was achieved with gels introduced and then exposed in the optical printer at the London Film Makers Cooperative.

The musical motif that Brian Eno took up comes from the music of the English Baroque composer John Dowland and is based on a short melody played on the lute.

The film, conceived for double screen, is also an opportunity to reinforce the idea of the loop with that of the phase shift that occurs between the two screens. The music too incorporates this same idea by playing on the principle of stereophonic phasing, creating with the image something like a phenomenon of iridescence, a very subtle audiovisual moiré effect. The impressive work on colour also finds its equivalent in the music, through the slow transformation that takes place from a single lute motif (ancestor of the guitar) that repeats and changes imperceptibly. The choice of images, loops of images of horses taken from westerns, and the lute-based music also create at once a complementarity and a contrast with the usual music of western films, based on the banjo. Berlin Horse would also be shown several times, in a stage version notably at the London Palladium in 1975, where Eno performs with Robert Fripp, as well as at the Olympia in Paris, in a memorable concert totally devoid of light apart from the projection of the film on the backdrop of the stage, which left the audience in a state of stupefaction, if we are to go by an article by Allan Okada.

Excerpt on double screen

Full film on single screen