Classic silent film experience recreated with live music
Improvisational ensemble will accompany masterpiece “Metropolis” by Fritz Lang
Watching a silent film with live accompaniment, especially the great “Metropolis” by Fritz Lang — offers a completely different experience from watching a modern Hollywood movie.
“When these films were being made, nobody really had any idea what kind of music would actually accompany the film because it could vary from a full orchestra to just a piano,” said Ted Harms, director of the VOC Silent Film Harmonic.
The locally-based improvisational ensemble, featuring musicians on guitar, bass, keyboards, violin, saxophone, percussion and clarinet, will accompany Lang’s masterpiece on Thursday at Kitchener’s Registry Theatre.
It’s the final performance in a year of celebration for the group’s 10th season. Earlier, VOC performed to “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and “Faust,” both of which are also giants of the silent screen.
Lang’s 1927 film is a “visual feast,” Harms said.
It depicts a world in which slaves toil beneath the earth to create a paradise for the elite society above.
Futuristic fiction, striking design, historic story lines and a banquet of special effects are combined and exaggerated into “a wonderfully exotic blend of artistic expressionism and political realism,” Harms said.
“So much so, that the film moves from ordinary science fiction into full-blown mythmaking.”
After sound arrived in the late 1920s, many films were defined by the music that surrounded them.
How can one imagine “Psycho” without the stabbing strings of Bernard Herrmann’s creation, or “Lord of the Rings” without Howard Shore’s all-enveloping musical score?
But with silent films, there’s the opportunity to reinvent the experience; to create intimacy, mood, and surprise.
Harms says VOC Silent Film Harmonic will adhere to its practice of working around themes, with different musicians scheduled to play at different times
during the film.
The challenge is to evoke rather than to explain.
Because silent films convey so much emotional information — with gestures, camera angles and settings — “our audience doesn’t need musical cues to know a scene is tense or tender, because they can see it,” Harms explained.
“If we can reflect that and not stick out, we’ve done our job.”