Category Archives: Music

The Cameraman’s Revenge

September 12, 2007 By in Animation, Filmmakers, Music 3 Comments

I’ve written before of those points where my interests in silents and modern jazz/avant garde music match. One particular hero is the American guitarist Gary Lucas, whose extraordinary accompaniment to a scene from Der Golem has already appeared on The Bioscope.

I’ve just found on his website another silent film with his accompaniment. He had a touring show, Sounds of the Surreal, which presents his live accompaniment to Rene Clair’s Entr’acte (1924), Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mecanique (1924), and Ladislaw Starewicz’s The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912), which available as a QuickTime file on his site.

The Cameraman’s Revenge

The Cameraman’s Revenge, from http://www.garylucas.com

Ladislaw Starewicz (1882-1965) is one of cinema’s true originals. His passion was entomology. He was taken on by the Russian company Khanzhonkov as a designer, and turned to directing model animation in 1912. His extraordinary idea was to build on his hobby by animating insects with stop-motion photography, in parodies of human activity. The Cameraman’s Revenge (or Mest’ kinematografičeskogo operatora) is his best-known film from this period, where a bettle and a grasshopper both pursue a dragonfly dancer, and the envious grasshopper captures evidence of a romantic tryst between the pair on his motion picture camera. It is one of the damnednest things you ever saw.

He made several other such stop-motion and animated films, including The Ant and the Grasshopper, Insects’ Aviation Week and Voyage to the Moon. In the 1920 Starewicz moved to France, where he won increased fame for animated films such as La voix du rossignol (1923), Amour noir et amour blanc (1928) and the feature-length Le roman de Renard (1928-39), all produced with dogged independence.

To be honest, the Gary Lucas score, with National steel guitar, doesn’t connect much with the action, and the version online is incomplete, missing the conclusion where the grasshopper’s film is shown. Nevertheless, it’s worth checking out just for being so odd, and selections of Starewicz’s films happily are available on DVD.

The silent film pianist speaks

September 11, 2007 By in Music

OK, back to some semblance of normality after all that mayhem. There’s a good interview with silent film pianist Neil Brand, originally published in The Scotsman, 6 August 2007, that’s just been made available online. Here’s the start of it:

I’m sat, listening to Neil Brand expound upon the history of silent film, when he glances over, across the hotel lobby and acknowledges his principal ally in reviving interest in the works of Chaplin, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy. Without breaking stride, Paul Merton sallies on past and announces “don’t believe a word”.

As a jobbing silent pianist, and by that I mean he’s constantly being invited to perform at the world’s most prestigious film festivals, Brand routinely eschews words for eloquent arrangements of music. Yet as someone whose career spans from before the talkies to the present day, at least according to definitive internet movie website IMDB, which eerily traces the 49-year-old’s collaborations back to the 1910s, the composer, actor and dramatist can’t half talk a fascinating history.

The previous day at a nearby cinema, I’d witnessed him score a restored print of Buster Keaton’s classic The General and heard Merton, for whose Silent Clowns TV show and live performances Brand played piano, chuckling at a film he’s undoubtedly seen tens of times, if not more. Like many in the audience I suspect, I was initially distracted by the novelty of this bespectacled chap at the piano, though after a while I ceased to notice even his distressingly bright shirt. A significant factor in this was obviously Keaton’s consummate physical performance, but another was the cocooning insulation of the accompanying music.

“It’s odd,” Brand reflects. “What you tend to find is that most audiences, for the first five or ten minutes, they’re mentally struggling with the fact that they’re watching a film and can’t hear anything else. Then something just clicks, I don’t know what it is that pulls them in.

Hmm, that sounds like one of Neil’s shirts alright. Follow the rest of the interview on the Future Movies site.

And see how the Internet Movie Database indeed traces Neil’s career from the present day back to the 1910s…

Image and Sound

September 3, 2007 By in Events, Images, Music

Friese-Greene film

Strange things going on at the Tate. This Friday, 7 September, Tate Britain is hosting Image and Sound, which it describes as

Iconic British silent films shown with live music dominate the enormous central gallery, and Steve Beresford, Scanner and David Toop perform together for one night only.

The event is organised by Artprojx (“a co-marketing, event production and creative strategic consulting agency”), and mixes artists’ films with experimental music/sounds and British silents – in this case, Anthony Asquith’s A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), with Stephen Horne at the piano, and Claude Friese-Greene’s The Open Road series of colour films 1924-25, with the much-travelled Neil Brand on the piano.

Goodness knows how the ‘iconic’ silents will blend in with the experimental sounds, artists’ films (including Haris Epaminonda’s Light, Tarahi II, Tarahi IIII, Tarahi V, Michael Nyman’s Moscow 11.19.31, and what sounds like a special treat, Emily Wardill’s Basking in what feels like ‘an ocean of grace’, I soon realise that I’m not looking at it, but rather that I AM it, recognising myself). With a bar available in the gallery and folk wandering to and fro, it should make for an interesting happening, but possibly not the ideal circumstances in which to savour the silents (though they are at least in their own room, The North Duveens).

Still, why not go along and support Neil and Stephen, and see if I’m wrong. The Tate’s growing commitment to exhibiting silent film is commendable, and if they can continue to place the films before new audiences, even if the settings may sometimes be challenging, this can only be to the good. Doors open at 6.00pm with tickets on a first-come-first-served basis, and the event runs til 10.00pm. The central Image and Sound event runs 7.00-9.00, The Open Road is at 6.30 and A Cottage on Dartmoor at 7.45.

There’s rather more information on the Artprojx site than on the Tate’s.

Neil Brand at Edinburgh

August 16, 2007 By in Festivals, Music

You can catch the indefatigable Neil Brand – pianist, composer, writer, actor, passionate advocate of the silent film – at the Edinburgh Festival this month, in two separate fringe shows.

Firstly, there’s The Silent Pianist Speaks, where Neil reveals the secrets of the profession of silent film pianist, acompanied by film clips. The show is running at the Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh daily until Monday August 27th.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s a staging of Neil’s original radio play, Joanna, performed the Invisible Theatre company, at the Jazz Bar. The blurb reads: “One grand piano. One secret. Joanna tells her tale of being encased in wood for a century, revealing more than just a few notes …”. There are tickets still available for the 17th, 18th and 19th.

Both shows have enthusiatic online reviews from audiences.

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.

A Throw of Dice

August 3, 2007 By in Music, Screenings

Among the many events marking the sixtieth anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan, there is a screening of Franz Osten’s 1929 Anglo-Indo-German film, A Throw of Dice, on 30 August, at 21.00pm, in Trafalgar Square. Live music will come from the London Symphony Orchestra, playing a new score by Nitin Sawhney.

It certainly sounds like an event to catch, even if the assertion on the India Now website that Franz Osten is “considered by many as one of the most talented directors of all time” will come as a surprise to most. It’s a proficiently told tale from the age of the Maharajahs, the print having come from the BFI National Archive, who approached Sawhney to provide the score. It’s also billed as that curious phenomenon of our times, “a digital restoration”. Osten, a German, made three silent films in India, on historical themes, with funding from the German Emelka studios, The Light of Asia (1926), Shiraz (1928) and A Throw of Dice (1929). They are all beautiful to look at, and stand up well without being particularly astonishing.

There are several other screenings of the film and score lined up, more details of which you can find on the Throw of Dice website. The later screenings are: Oct 26th Sage Gateshead, Oct 27th Bridgewater Hall – Manchester, and Oct 28th Symphony Hall – Birmingham, all with the Northern Sinfonia. A bold initiative, well planned by somebody – go and see it if you can.

Strade del Cinema

August 1, 2007 By in Festivals, Music

Fred Frith

It’s a new one on me, but the Strade del Cinema festival is running 6-15 August, at Aosta, Italy. It’s a festival of music and silent film, with extra bits. This year they have a Laurel and Hardy strand, with assorted of their classic silent shorts with intriguing music accompaniment (Two Tars gets to be accompanied by cello, electric bass, electronics and a Japanese koto; You’re Darn Tootin’ is accompanied by a ‘digital performer’). There’s a screening of Pastrone’s Il Fuoco (1916) with live score by avant garde guitarists Marc Ribot and the great Fred Frith, one of my heroes. And there’s Jean Epstein’s La Belle Nivernaise (1923), with vocal accompaniment by Les Grandes Voix Bulgares, which ought to be quite something. There’s also a dramatic piece on Rudolph Valentino, L’Amante de Mondo.

Just time to pop over there, if you’re quick…

Clonic Mutations

July 18, 2007 By in Avant garde, Music

Just time to let you know about Clonic Mutations, another silent film event taking place at Tate Modern as part of its Dali & Film strand, on Friday 20 July. Here’s the blurb:

Clonic Mutations features the world premiere of live new music scores created for a range of experimental films made between 1904 and 1952 with strong ties to surrealism. Composed for twelve musicians and clockwork toys by Sergio López Figueroa, a Spanish composer and specialist in silent film, the scores examine new contextual relationships between music, historical experimental film and art. The screening will feature the newly restored version of Un Chien andalou by Filmoteca Española.

Programme duration approx 60′

The Strength and Agility of Insects, F. Percy Smith, 1911, 3’58, DVD

A Phantasy, Norman McLaren, 1952, 7’15, 16mm

El Hotel eléctrico, Segundo de Chomón, 1904, 4′, digiBeta

Tusalava, Len Lye, 1929, 9′, 35mm

L’Étoile de mer, Man Ray, 1928, 18′, 35mm

Un Chien Andalou, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, 1929, 17′, 35mm

Full details from the Tate Modern site.

Carl Davis and the Chaplin Mutuals

July 13, 2007 By in Music, Performers, Screenings 1 Comment

The Cadogan Hall in London is presenting all twelve of Charlie Chaplin’s Mutual films over four programmes, with scores composed and conducted by Carl Davis and performed live by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The screenings are taking place 15-18 August, and will be introduced by Paul Ross, Richard Briers, David Robinson (Chaplin’s biographer), and Michael Chaplin (Chaplin’s son). The Cadogan Hall site has an excellently designed Chaplin section, with photographs and clips, well worth visiting. And it has all the booking information, of course.

Programmes
Wednesday 15 August, 7.30pm
Easy Street, One A.M., The Immigrant (introduced by Paul Ross)

Thursday 16 August, 7.30pm
Behind the Screen, The Fireman, The Rink (introduced by Richard Briers)

Friday 17 August, 7.30pm
The Pawn Shop, The Vagabond, The Cure (introduced by David Robinson)

Saturday 18 August, 7.30pm
The Count, The Floor Walker, The Adventurer (introduced by Michael Chaplin, with question and answer session with Carl Davis)