Daily Archives: August 11, 2007

Broken Blossoms

August 11, 2007 By in Music, Online videos 5 Comments

This has already got a mention in the comments to the post on the upcoming Lillian Gish Film Festival, but it’s well worth highlighting. It’s an extract from D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) with a radical score from Brian Traylor, which featured at the festival. The use of electronica, noise, and the absence of anything melodic might prove to be a bit of a challenge over a period of time, but I find something quite hypnotic about it in this extract form at least. Others may beg to differ?

There are two other clips posted by Traylor on YouTube:

Swirling noises represent the assorted miserable options in life available to Lillian Gish.

Look out here for the electronic growls representing Donald Crisp’s speech.

Interview with Carl Davis

August 11, 2007 By in Music, Performers 1 Comment

In anticipation of the screenings of the Chaplin Mutuals at the Cadogan Hall next week (as reported earlier), there’s a short interview with composer Carl Davis on the BBC News Online site:

“There’s a unity about the whole thing, some of it is very autobiographical. I wondered if I could put together a story if I wasn’t locked into doing them in the order in which he made them.”

The result is that the films will not be performed in chronological order but in an order “suggestive of Chaplin’s own life, like a miniature biography”.

Now that is intriguing. For those who want to test out Davis’ thesis, the order in which the films will be shown is: Easy Street, One A.M., The Immigrant, Behind the Screen, The Fireman, The Rink, The Pawn Shop, The Vagabond, The Cure, The Count, The Floor Walker, and The Adventurer.

Read the rest of the interview here.