Dir.
Stefan Schwietert, Switzerland/Germany, 2007, 86 mins
Documentary in German/Swiss German/Russian with subtitles
Cast:
Erika Stucky, Noldi Alder, Christian Zehnder
Review by Carol Allen
The idea of a documentary about the Swiss art of yodelling raises fears that it could be the Swiss equivalent of a movie in praise of Scottish bagpipe music or English Morris dancing, not to mention bringing to mind The Sound of Music. But in Echoes of Home director Schwietert is attempting something a little deeper. While, as he indicates in the title, yodelling is part of a long cultural tradition in Switzerland, his film is more to do with the way it is now being developed in the work of three contemporary musicians, and he laces the movie generously with examples of these artists in performance.
The most entertaining of these is Stucky, a Swiss American, born in San Francisco, who returned to Switzerland as a child. Also a jazz musician, Stucky describes her music as "a mixture of classic alpine culture and urban groove". She's also a very entertaining talker. Kender, who admits that in his early years he was not at all keen on what he describes as "cheesy Swiss folk music", combines yodelling with something called "overtone singing" and scat and tours as a double act with alphorn player Balthasar Streiff. Alder comes from a Swiss folk music dynasty and as a child in the sixties toured the world with his father and brothers playing traditional Swiss dance music in full Alpine costume - a sort of combination of the Osmonds and the Von Trapp family. As an adult he's devoted himself to "shaking up" that traditional approach, something that his family, while supportive, appear to regard with mixed feelings. As one of his brothers puts it, he wouldn't want to listen to any of young Noldi's pieces more than once.
If you don't know much about yodellling though, this film won't really help you. While Steigert touches on the fact that the sound has its roots in the landscape with pretty shots of the Swiss mountains to illustrate that fact, he doesn't go into the history of it. For example, us non Swiss are taught that yodelling had its origins as a means of communicating from one mountain peak to another. We see a couple of elderly herdsmen doing a bit of that but the film doesn't tell us if that was indeed its original purpose. Schwietert also sometimes omits to give us other important information, as in later in the film, when Zehnder travels to an unspecified part of the world, where he jams and gives concerts with a group of musicians called Huun Huur Tu. The press notes tell me they are in Tuva on the Mongolian border but, while you might hazard a guess from the look of the landscape and the ethnic appearance of the musicians, you wouldn't actually know that from the film. The story telling technique is also somewhat shapeless, cutting amongst his three interviewees and their work with no strong narrative thread, while the music itself is somewhat specialised and certainly a long way from the traditional "yudel ay ee oh", sometimes evoking Middle Eastern music and sometimes indeed even the sound of the bagpipes.
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