La Valse

Submitted by vinteuil on Sat, 08/09/2008 - 7:30pm. Tags:

Culture

(1) Some of the worst movies ever made were the various & several travesties of Edgar Allan Poe stories directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price, way back in the 1960's.

The best of these worst, by all accounts, was The Masque of the Red Death (1964) - a camp classic, if ever there was one.

(2) Maurice Ravel's great tone poem, "La Valse," is often thought to be a rather cheerful celebration of the Viennese Waltz - or, more generally, the "spirit of the dance."

Except that its last few pages work themselves up into a paroxysm of musical violence that gives Le Sacre du Printemps a run for its money. Which has given rise to the legend that "La Valse" is really a "dance of death," inspired by - you guessed it! - Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death."

(3) So let's see if we can get Ravel's tone poem to work as a soundtrack for Poe's story, as filmed by Corman & Price:

You be the judge.

P.S.: please do "high quality" if you can - it definitely looks & sounds better.
--

God help the while, a bad world I say.

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Yeah this works (#109379)

by catchy on Mon, 08/11/2008 - 6:23pm

Good idea.

I love this kind of thing. I turn the TV on to an old movie w/ the sound off and play music all the time.

You never know when you'll get some interesting interplay.

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Thanks, catchy. (#109604)

by vinteuil on Tue, 08/12/2008 - 3:21pm

I had to do a *bit* of tweaking - but surprisingly little - to get things to fit just right.

There are those who look down on *La Valse* as not among Ravel's finer efforts. Obviously, I'm not one of them. It's fascinating, frightening music.

And Celibidache conducts it like nobody else.

God help the while, a bad world I say.

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FYI (#109620)

by HankP on Tue, 08/12/2008 - 4:25pm

I learned from doing some audio editing that you can delete ~1/100th of a second without being able to hear it on playback. Or you could download this program which allows you to alter the timing of sound files or portions of them without affecting the pitch. With a couple of tricks like that you can synchronize music to video pretty smoothly.

I blame it all on the Internet

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and it's free! (#109625)

by vinteuil on Tue, 08/12/2008 - 4:40pm

Excellent.

Many thanks, HP.

God help the while, a bad world I say.

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One warning (#109630)

by HankP on Tue, 08/12/2008 - 4:51pm

from bitter experience - never edit .mp3 files. Like .jpg files, they're compressed, and editing them can muck up the quality really fast. So either get a file in an uncompressed format or convert it to an uncompressed format before editing, then convert it back into a compressed format when you're done with it.

I blame it all on the Internet

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Noted. (#109650)

by vinteuil on Tue, 08/12/2008 - 6:45pm

And thanks again.

Just you wait for my next vid!

God help the while, a bad world I say.

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Point of order (#109031)

by Kierkegaard on Sat, 08/09/2008 - 7:52pm

By far the worst movies I've ever had to suffer through have been recent Hollywood blockbusters, many of which make "Masque" look like a masterpiece of taste, good scriptwriting, and sound judgement. Jack Black and Cameron Diaz in "The Holiday", for example, make even Ed Wood's worst efforts look well-acted, Diane Keaton and jack Nicholson's "Something's Gotta Give" made Russ Meyer look like Ingmar Bergman, and as for Keanu Reaves and Sandra Bullock's "The Lake House"--was there ever a film in cinematic history that made less actual sense? I mean, seriously, can anyone here explain it to me?

And I actually felt violated after "Little Miss Sunshine". I've lived with dysfunctional families, I've married into dysfunctional families, I know from dysfunctional. But at least they all uttered their lines with conviction at the dinner table, they weren't just auditioning...

Forgive me. Just a pet peeve.

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Little Miss Sunshine (#109381)

by catchy on Mon, 08/11/2008 - 6:27pm

brought me no sunshine. A couple of funny lines from Alan Arkin but otherwise I don't remember smiling.

Certainly not at the last dance # which was about as uncreative + cheap as they come. And not at the boring slapstick 'get the body out of the hospital' scene either.

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K, I am the choir... (#109038)

by vinteuil on Sat, 08/09/2008 - 8:35pm

...to which you preach.

God help the while, a bad world I say.

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