Under the swaying trees and the scent of rain-drenched summer air, a peculiar transformation is unfolding in the courtyard of the Goethe-Institut Georgien. As darkness falls over Tbilisi, flickering black-and-white visions from another century light up a modest outdoor screen, and live sounds—at times industrial, at times delicate—crackle and bloom beneath the rustle of leaves and distant thunder. This is Sommerkino mit Musik, the Goethe-Institut’s bold summer initiative to bring the late masterpieces of Weimar cinema into sharp contemporary resonance through the disruptive, electrifying prism of live experimental music.
Weimar in Georgia: Between Echo and Electricity
Between July 11 and 24, three seminal films from the twilight of the Weimar Republic—Metropolis (1927), Pandora’s Box (1929), and The Blue Angel (1930)—are being screened in the Goethe-Institut’s courtyard. But this is no ordinary retrospective. Each silent (or early sound) film is paired with a daring musical experiment: electronic composer VAZHMARR scores Lang’s dystopian epic live; pianist Nino Zhvania overlays Pabst’s psychosexual tragedy with the eerie, fragmented sonatas of John Cage. The final screening of The Blue Angel, featuring Marlene Dietrich’s unforgettable transformation into the cabaret goddess Lola Lola, is still to come.
The Goethe-Institut’s program situates Weimar cinema not as a relic of modernism’s final sigh before fascist silence, but as a still-radical archive of aesthetic dissent—a flickering mirror in which contemporary Georgia can glimpse its own artistic tensions and civic tremors. The format—half picnic, half protest—encourages a new generation of viewers to read these films not as academic monuments, but as live ammunition in the war over culture’s future.
Metropolis Recharged: Dystopia Rewired
The opening night on July 11 belonged to Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s phantasmagoric city-machine of a film. First released in 1927, Metropolis remains astonishing not only for its scale—massive sets, hundreds of extras, visionary special effects—but for the dark elegance of its political allegory: a city rigidly divided between decadent technocrats above and exploited workers below, until a messianic figure bridges the two through “the heart.”
But the screening in Tbilisi was far from a museum piece. VAZHMARR, the Georgian electronic musician known for sculpting texture from distortion, brought a jagged, deeply physical energy to the film. Gone were the original orchestral swellings and melodramatic motifs of Gottfried Huppertz’s score; in their place was a sonic landscape more reminiscent of industrial collapse and digital entropy. Metallic drones, fractured rhythms, and abrupt silences turned Lang’s vision into something stranger and closer to us: a prophecy less about steam-powered class warfare than about the cyborgian collapse of human agency in the age of machine learning.
VAZHMARR’s score reframed Metropolis not as nostalgic science fiction, but as a still-valid warning. In 1927, the future was imagined as an architectural sublime—gothic skyscrapers and subterranean hells. In 2025, VAZHMARR reminded us, dystopia is ambient, algorithmic, already here.
Rain, Ruin, and Cage: Pandora’s Box Interrupted
On July 16, weather intervened. As the opening frames of Pandora’s Box appeared—Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s luminous, tragic tale of desire and downfall—the courtyard was soaked in rain. Louise Brooks’s Lulu, framed in chiaroscuro close-ups, seemed to emerge from and dissolve into the storm. Pianist Nino Zhvania was performing music from the rain-soaked scores, her prepared piano whispering metallic echoes and percussive thuds into the wind.
Zhvania had chosen John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano as the sonic counterpoint to Pabst’s tale of seduction and doom. The match was uncanny. Cage’s pieces, composed for a piano altered with screws, bolts, and rubber—half instrument, half sculpture—paralleled Lulu’s world of distorted innocence and inevitable collapse. The black-and-white emotions of Cage’s concept and the black-and-white film on screen engaged in a haunting visual and auditory rhyme.
But then, reality broke in. Rain intensified, equipment faltered, and after an hour, the screening was suspended. Goethe-Institut announced a rescheduling. Yet even in that window, the performance achieved something remarkable: it reactivated the political promise of Cage’s philosophy—chance, noise, interference—as a kind of sonic resistance. The ambient chaos of the workers covering the projector, the wind, the buzz of failing power cables—all of it became, in true Cageian spirit, part of the music.
Between Cult and Community: A Format That Works
The Goethe-Institut’s Sommerkino series is more than a nostalgic gesture. It’s a curatorial masterstroke—a collision of avant-garde cinema and live experimental music that reanimates the political and aesthetic stakes of both. For the Georgian context, this format is especially potent.
On the one hand, it provides a rare platform for regional experimental musicians like VAZHMARR and Nino Zhvania to perform in front of broad, intergenerational audiences outside of concert-hall elitism. On the other, it situates the films of Weimar cinema—a cinema forged in crisis, uncertainty, and ideological violence—as more than just historical curios. These films still speak, and when paired with radical sound, they shout.
The courtyard setting intensifies this intimacy. With cushions on concrete, snacks, and freely flowing drinks, the Goethe-Institut becomes a space of both encounter and memory. Beneath the stars, alongside neighbors and strangers, viewers are invited to experience these films as live, communal events—unpredictable, affective, and insistently relevant.
Toward the Blue Angel: A Note of Anticipation
As of this writing, the final screening of the series—The Blue Angel (1930)—is still to come. The film marked Germany’s transition into sound cinema and catapulted Marlene Dietrich to international fame. Her performance as Lola Lola, the cabaret singer who seduces and destroys a repressed schoolteacher, has become iconic. Directed by Josef von Sternberg, The Blue Angel exudes the last gasp of decadent Weimar glamor before the curtains fell on democratic culture in Germany.
How the Goethe-Institut will frame this final screening—what live accompaniment it will choose, how it will handle the complex gender politics and performative irony of Dietrich’s role—remains to be seen. But one suspects the courtyard will once again become a theater of resistance.
A Quiet Revolution in the Courtyard
In a cultural landscape often dominated by spectacle and nostalgia, the Goethe-Institut’s Sommerkino mit Musik achieves something rare: it makes history matter again, and it does so through sound. This is more than a summer event; it is a quiet revolution in the courtyard.
By pairing the formal radicalism of Weimar cinema with the sonic experimentation of contemporary Georgia, the series affirms a powerful curatorial vision: cinema is never dead, music is never background, and the past is always ready to speak—provided we listen carefully enough, even through the rain.
Review by Ivan Nechaev
