Multimedia: rock symphony meets frozen film

Alignment of the planets? Thursday through Saturday at the Yale Cabaret, enough disparate aesthetics, styles, and tastes will be woven together to bring about the end of the world as we know it. Those who have a season subscription to the Cabaret will rub elbows with Tune Inn regulars, French film buffs will hobnob with Fosse fanatics, and for patches of 30 minutes in one low-lit basement on Yale's campus, no one will be thinking about The Game.

An explanation is perhaps in order. Lily White is playing an original score to La Jetée. A further explanation: the members of Lily White (Matthew Dunkel, JE '01, Joseph Grimm, JE '01, Steve Walls, and Will Noland) keep themselves busy with no less than three other bands and side projects: 33.3, Arcaro, and Cabeza de Vaca. La Jetée is the ground-breaking 1962 film by Chris Marker. It is a deeply philosophical work of science fiction that explored temporal paradoxes long before Doc ever warned Marty McFly about running into himself. To call it a film and not a movie is more than a matter of snobbery: the word "movie" was coined to refer to moving pictures, whereas the 27-minute La Jetée consists almost entirely of haunting black-and-white still frames.

"We have the deck stacked in our favor," Joseph Grimm, JE '01, says. "The film's so good, we'd really have to screw up for the audience not to like it." La Jetée is the surreal story of a post-apocalyptic time traveler who jumps between temporal planes not in a twittering, beeping machine, but in a sleep mask. Just as the anonymous protagonist constantly drifts from harrowing subterranean tunnels to an idyllic, pre-apocalyptic Paris, Lily White weaves a sonic tapestry that oscillates between eerie nostalgia and warm placidity. Opening with a steel pedal guitar as the film depicts still shots of early-'60s Aéroport d'Orly, the multi-valent group goes on to play a Chinese fire drill with its instruments, alternating on guitars, bass, trumpet, and Rhodes keyboard (Walls plays percussion throughout). The piece builds up around various themes and motifs that wind in and out with the traveler's jumps of consciousness, eventually coming full circle to the steel pedal guitar and haunting stills that begin the show.

Concert

La Jetée An original score written and performed by Lily White Thurs., Nov. 16 through Sun., Nov. 19, 8:30 and 11 p.m. Yale Cabaret

The project has taken as odd and meandering a course as the nameless voyageur. The piece began last year, and, in a reversal of the usual order of things, "discovered" the film it now accompanies. After a debut in last year's production of Shakespeare's Pericles, the group has performed the work in Providence and Connecticut. But in this unlikely performance, the group may have found its musical niche, in which the ethereal, destructured composition commands full audience interest and doesn't suffer from the three-minute attention span of bar-goers. The band members say that people allow much more ambience and subtlety in soundtracks, allowing Lily White to give more and more layers of texture to their dreamy post-rock mini-symphony.

The novelty of the situation has its appeal as well: "I like the idea of playing for a 50-year-old doctor and his wife instead of people who always come to our shows," Grimm says.

Thursday through Sunday, the Yale Cabaret will put on a rock band that doesn't play rock doing the score to a movie that doesn't move. And God bless 'em.

Graphic by Marisa Bass.

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