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let me come in

Composed by David Lang, film by Bill Morrison

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Bill Morrison's breathtaking new film unveils a world premiere from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang

Lang's new song "let me come in" showcases the exquisite voice of soprano Angel Blue, one of today's brightest opera stars. In this utterly compelling Digital Short, Lang's latest musical jewel is given gorgeous visual expression by the extraordinary filmmaker Bill Morrison, who breathes new life into rediscovered fragments of a long-forgotten silent film to astonishing effect.

Lang's music is hypnotic and his lyrics—drawn from the Song of Songs—are sensual and yearningly persistent. As the listener is drawn into an intimate world of desire, a compelling meeting of lovers plays out before our eyes. Reclaimed old nitrate footage explodes onto the screen, both nostalgic and hallucinatory in equal parts—the gorgeous disintegration of the rotting film stock giving contemporary viewers a fascinating glimpse of the not-so-distant past.

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Bill Morrison's Digital Short "let me come in" features recovered nitrate film footage from an obscure 1928 German silent film, "Pawns of Passion," starring Olga Tschechowa and Hans Stüwe.

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A still from Bill Morrison's Digital Short "let me come in"

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A still from Bill Morrison's Digital Short "let me come in"

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A still from Bill Morrison's Digital Short "let me come in"

Creators

Composer and Librettist
David Lang
Producer and Director
Bill Morrison

Performers

Soprano
Angel Blue
Conductor
Bryan Wagorn
Viola
David Creswell
Cello
Anja Wood
Percussion
Miles Salerni

A Note from Filmmaker Bill Morrison
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A Note from Filmmaker Bill Morrison

In the nitrate film vaults of the Library of Congress’s Audio Visual Conservation Center on the Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia, there is a shelf that sometimes has a sticky note bearing my name attached to it. This means that a film on that shelf has gone past the point where it could be considered worth saving for preservation purposes, and perhaps its only use moving forward would be if I chose to have a digital scan made to incorporate into one of my films. I am always grateful that goopy, sticky films that are deemed not worth saving are sometimes described at the Library (and somewhat dismissively at that) as having “gone all ‘Bill Morrison’ on us.” 

In 2012, the nitrate vault manager, George Willeman, alerted me to such a film. It was a reel from Pawns of Passion (1928), a silent German production known as Liebeshölle in its original language, which translates as “Love Hell.” The film had been donated to the Library by Bruce Lawton, Jr., who after the sudden death of a colleague, had come into possession of a large cache of nitrate films that had been stored for the better part of the century in a barn in Pennsylvania. While another copy could possibly be stored elsewhere, IMDb lists this as a lost film.  

The backstory of Pawns of Passion involves a Russian ballerina who, after having been separated from her young son in 1917, throws herself into the Seine in Paris, whereupon she is rescued by an artist. The action in let me come in begins as he brings her into his house after fishing her out of the river. But without context, it is not immediately clear what condition she is in, or what his intentions are. At first, let me come in seems to be the over-excited pleading of a predatory lover. But as the encounter evolves, it becomes an entirely different entreaty, where both parties seek solace and protection in one another. They are pulling each other out of their own personal "love hell." 

When David Lang sent me the lyrics and MIDI track of let me come in, and again when I heard LA Opera’s track featuring Angel Blue’s incredible plaintive interpretation, my mind immediately recalled the ambiguous tension in this scene. It is a rumination on love, and the borderline separating two souls, seemingly from the precipice of consciousness. 

The film is walking this same line. Left to rot in a barn, and then scanned and archived again for another eight years on my own personal hard drive, it has found a new life through David’s words and music, and Angel Blue’s voice. What survives are these few images pulled from the river Styx, between this earth and the underworld. 

Bill Morrison, April 5, 2021 

 

 

 

A Note from Composer David Lang
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A Note from Composer David Lang

 

let me come in was written for the soprano Angel Blue, co-commissioned by LA Opera and the Fisher Center at Bard College. 

let me come in is part of a series of pieces I have been writing over the past several years, in which I have applied different literary filters to the text of the biblical Song of Songs. The idea behind this series is that if we look at the text from many different angles it may eventually begin to reveal more of its emotional and spiritual powers. Or at least that is the hope. 

For this song, I started with one verse in the King James version of the text, where the woman is awaiting the knock of her lover on her door.   

5:2  I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night 

I love the sense of waiting for something beautiful to happen, the anticipation of the moment, and also I love that the narrator hasn't moved to open the door yet–the sensuousness of the waiting is more powerful for her, and for us, than the actual physicality of meeting.   

Of course, these texts were originally in Hebrew, then translated and mistranslated into Greek and Latin and eventually English, and their various translations have changed the details of their various meanings. Many of these are intentional mistranslations; different Christian denominations, for example, have their own shaded versions of the text, in an attempt to lower the temperature of the original, to tone down its sensuality, or to make it seem more like a metaphor, or like a dream. I took 17 different versions of this verse, each slightly different, and then I alphabetized their phrases and got rid of all the duplicated lines, in order to make one single text, with all its interpretive angles shown. 

let me come in is dedicated to Sophie Claudel, in memory of Frédéric Bonnemaison.

"David Lang's music is beautifully accessible, thought provoking and evocative."

– WOSU Public Media

"Bill Morrison—a man whose ability to conduct archival footage like Toscanini could a symphony orchestra was never in doubt—has emerged as one of our premier screen historians... One descries all manner of patterns and textures in the riot of rot: fingerprint whorls, swirls of smoke, coral reefs, baked desert plains, networks of cracks like those on an Albert Pinkham Ryder canvas."

Nick Pinkerton – Artforum

"Lang's music always comes out sounding luminous, gorgeous"

Jayson Greene – Pitchfork

Co-commissioned by LA Opera and the Fisher Center at Bard College.

Dedicated to Sophie Claudel, in memory of Frédéric Bonnemaison. 

This project is generously supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and from a consortium of donors to LA Opera's Contemporary Opera Initiative, chaired by Barry and Nancy Sanders.

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