Women know very well that history is accustomed to forgetting their existence and achievements. But electronic music allowed a group of them to break the silence they were doomed to and create sounds that are still modern 50, 70 and even 100 years later. A selection of these pioneers, from different places and times, come together in Sisters With Transistors, Lisa Rovner’s 2020 documentary, which Filmin recently added to its catalogue.
With great success, it is the artist Laurie Anderson who lends her voice to her predecessors and tells a story that dares not to sacrifice the experimental nature of her subject in order to please a mass audience. Sisters With Transistors doesn’t demean its content, it’s not condescending towards the viewer or its protagonists. He argues that what they have done is still avant-garde, strange, radical, loud and even uncomfortable.
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If the feature film fails at anything, it is in maintaining too conventional a narrative structure to analyze a rather unconventional phenomenon. The biographies of each of these women follow one another in near chronological order and individually, with little overlap or contrast to the present, meaning that the solid historical context in which they are placed loses much of its strength.
Lithuanian Clara Rockmore was a violin prodigy who, exactly a century ago, amplified the sounds of her stringed instrument with the theremin. With her effervescent hairstyle, which is only ruled by scarves and turbans, she comes across as a fortune teller who can bring the future closer to her audience. Daphne Oram, of course, claimed that the field of nerds could also be female: from the BBC she created the Oramics machine, which drew sounds by converting graphic images into music. As early as the 1980s, Suzanne Ciani was bringing her innovative tunes into American homes through the late nights of the era. And Delia Derbyshire transcended popular culture when she composed the theme song for British series Doctor Who. Until her arrival, according to Rovner’s documentary, the term composer was synonymous with a dead man. And there was the modern day Mozart and Beethoven, who with their mere presence defended that women are the most untapped natural resource on the planet.
The film is also a reminder of all the possibilities brought by the arrival of technology. Among them, Sisters With Transistors stands out, in which a few women take charge in front of gigantic synthesizers, absorbing the sounds of a new industrial and electric world. Given the cumbersome tool they used to create unreleased tunes, some of the protagonists in Rovner’s story seem like cable girls, these women halfway between tradition and the liberation that labor independence affords. Only this time they could express what was on their minds in a new and abstract way.
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