Well, you may have noticed that we haven’t had a Filmusik concert in several months.  For some, of course, that might seem normal for a performing arts group, but we’re more akin to pre-schoolers at recess than the Metropolitan Opera; we just have to keep moving to stay happy.

Although there have been no performances, we’ve been hard at work largely on our new office and rehearsal space at the Hollywood Theatre.  We are proud to be partnered with the theatre this year and bring more music and artists onstage.   The theatre is seeing a lot of changes, beer sales (still all-ages), lobby remodel and a host of new original programming that’s making use of the potential of the theatre as a performance venue.  Be sure to check out the Sound and Vision concerts that have recently premiered Michel Gondry works-in-progress and hosted the work of local filmmakers.

Now our underground laboratory nears completion and a host of fun projects are on the horizon, collaborations with The Blue Cranes, Federale, Electric Opera Company, our Late Night concert series and our live arcade music events.  Our position of soundtrack-wizards-in-residence is an honor and we can’t wait to get going….

Joan developed her animated painting when an architecture student, then shifted from paint to clay while working with Will Vinton Studios from 1977-1987. During that time her work included design and animation for Academy-Award Nominees Return to Oz, Rip Van Winkle, and The Creation. Her work is also featured in the Vinton film The Little Prince

Approximately two years ago in Tokyo, a warm spring night lead me to an aspiration in favor of seeing an American film. During the past three years I had been honoring a personal ban on modern cinema. I had no desire to see any film that was made beyond 1929. The disposition of a dandy (and I am one) calls for exorbitant concerns; particularly in the aesthetic department. To compromise one self is a sin as far as I was concerned. This so-called severe practice has guided me to a beautiful art-form known as the Benshi tradition.

My refusal to go to a boring useless contemporary “western” film had led yours truly to a screening of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera. As I was heading toward the theater I saw a flyer with Chaney’s characterization of the Phantom on it. I couldn’t read the Japanese characters, so I was contemplating if this would be the showing of the horrific 1925 classic film. The one image on the flyer that had puzzled me (beside the lettering) was a drawing of a Japanese woman with a top hat and tails on. I knew there was no such character in the film, so I was perplexed with this curious image on an advertisement with Lon Chaney.

I went to that performance with great curiosity, sensing there would be a surprise waiting for my high notion of culture. That surprise evolved into the remarkable Midori Sawato. Why is she remarkable? Because she represents the link between theater, poetry, and film.

First a little bit of history. When cinema evolved into a presentation in the late 1890′s, there was a narrator that traveled with the films. The narrator usually gave a lecture about the film and described the incidents on the big screen. Audiences at first needed the narrator to tell them what was being projected. As cinema developed into a more customary art, the narrator became irrelevant, as music and title cards replaced the live performer by the movie screen. Except in Japan, where the narrator was called a benshi.

The benshi system came to life during the turn of the century, when the Lumiere and Edison films first came to Japan. The benshi existed throughout the silent era in Japan – which unlike the West lasted to the mid-thirties even though sound was easily obtainable. The benshi performer had a strong presence in the Japanese film industry.

The benshi performer was more celebrated than the movie stars themselves on the projected screen. Audiences during that period were certainly not that interested in film for itself, but seeing the benshi’s presentation was the main attraction. Generally, the Japanese audience are not taken with cinema.

Class-wise films were always third on the list – behind such general public activity as Kabuki and drinking. Legitimate artistic or entertainment events were live performances -and the Japanese needed a live presence on stage if they wanted to participate in any variety of theater. Audiences would have felt cheated if there was simply a film being shown. Japanese theater has this built-in Brechtian affectation where one is always reminded that you are watching something on stage. It is amazing even now when one observes a film on Japanese TV and there is an immediate acknowledgment of the actors’ role, as they first appear in the production. The benshi reconstructs this practice when they discuss the actor’s background during the actual performance.

In Japanese theater there is perpetually a live narrator clarifying the action on the stage. The stark Noh theater attributes a chorus chanting the minimal story line, and the Kabuki has a similar structure. What is astonishing to the westerner is not the act of retaining a live performer with the film, but that the benshi would often add their own interpretation to what is happening on the screen.

The benshi would incorporate their own unique dialogue to the film, even changing the storyline to enhance their own definition of what is occurring on the screen. The remarkable component of this practice is that the benshi is utilizing a finished film and operating with that material as a springboard for their own story. If there is a scene in the film of a beautiful moon, the benshi may use that image to recite a poem about the lunar landscape, or some other classification to describe their center of attention besides the actual narration of the film.

Compatible to assemblage art, the benshi treats the completed film as found footage to attach their own cultural terminology to the images. The benshi is known to focus their attention on the background scenery, such as the weather, location, architecture, and clothes. In essence, they are reediting the film for the audience as they sit there. Not by cutting the actual movie, but by having their audience’s watchfulness drawn away from the actual events in the film.

Being a poet and always feeling close to the cinema, this to me was the utopian meeting ground – poetry to inspire film, not the other way round! To the general public, film is usually treated on a higher ground than poetry. More people go to films than readings or buying poetry. Great poets have used cinema as a source for poetry, but never has poetry been demonstrated in such a translucent flow from screen to benshi’s mouth.

This presentation of a story-teller – which in itself is an ancient Asian tradition – merging with a 20th Century art form, is intriguing in its cross-cultural interpretation; which poetically causes another translation of what is, or how we, the audience, see cinema.

The artistry of the benshi makes the emotions transparent. This spectacle is similar to an Italian opera and not knowing Italian. One wonders if it is actually crucial to comprehend the language of the opera or benshi, and to be moved by the tradition and beauty of the native speaking voice: a voice that cannot be restricted in dissimilar cultures.

Watching Phantom of the Opera with a benshi had a pronounced aftereffect on me. For the first time I had witnessed an organic relationship between live theater and film. In the past, I had seen performance artists performing live with video or film, but the results were always forced and seemed to be insincere in their undertaking. The benshi however, with its long tradition of Japanese narration, seems as simple as breathing.

The Japanese language in itself for the benshi is furthermore crucial. I was wondering if it would be as effective if it was in English. This I decided was not the principle of the performance. The issue is that the benshi, whether it is a foreign or Japanese film, is putting their own culture into the performance. They comply with the presentation on the screen, which they unmistakably bring to their own revelation and culture when interpreting of the film. The Japanese language has built-in cultural aspects that are not translatable into English.

Midori Sawato is the last professional benshi. She shares her great revolution in not only loving films, but working with them. She is like Charlie Parker, in that she abducts a melody (film) and expands the medium onto another sphere. Benshi is not officially an art form: the presentation is looked upon as outright entertainment. When I do go to a benshi performance, the surroundings reminds me of the circus. There is a side-show aesthetic connected with the medium. The subject matter is not the circus itself but the classic nature of the entertainment seems turn of the century and small-townish.

After her pre-World War Two introduction music, Midori Sawato leaps onto the stage and makes a traditional speech about the film and nature of the show. She then sits herself down by a small table with a low light on the stage left of the screen. The audience consistently sees the performer even when the film is on.

In a voice that is comparable to “exotica” singer Yma Sumac, she portrays each character with a different pronunciation. Though not understanding Japanese, the music in her voice expresses more than the feelings and humor of whatever is happening on the screen. A great benshi performer never takes away from whatever the big screen offers, but enhances the viewing of the film and fills it with textures and layers of interpretation. Though ironically enough, the benshi performance is dying, the craft itself gives film a “a living” presentation and to one who was new to this beautiful process, there was a feeling of fresh air being pumped into the hot sticky cinema house that warm spring night in Tokyo.

“One of the more curious fad gimmicks of the period was Smell-O-Vision, a process initiated in 1960 by Mike Todd, Jr., son of the famed showman. Mike Todd, Sr. had entertained the world with his massive production of AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (1956), but sadly, perished in a plane crash in 1958. Todd, Jr. invested his inheritance in the development of Smell-O- Vision, a process in which evocative smells were pumped to the cinema audience through pipes leading to individual seats in the auditorium. Bottles of scent were held on a rotating drum and the process was triggered by a signal on the film itself.

Only one film, SCENT OF A MYSTERY, was made in Smell-O-Vision and was far from a milestone in movie history. Mike Todd, Jr. lost his entire investment and left the film business. As an added audience incentive, Eddie Fisher, best friend of Mike Todd, Sr. and, at the time, the husband of Todd’s widow, Elizabeth Taylor, sang the memorable theme song from SCENT OF A MYSTERY. Filmmaker, John Waters, paid homage to Smell-O-Vision with his 1980 film, POLYESTER. Waters created the process of Odorama and, rather than pumping in scents, used individual audience ‘Scratch and Sniff’ cards.”

Now here’s a format war worth fighting for.  This is sure to take off, invest now while the getting’s good.

A significant footnote in the history of Smell-O-Vision is a copycat technique called AromaRama that was rushed out at the last second to cash in on the impending “smellomania.” In December, 1959, two months before the opening of Scent of Mystery, a travelogue of China called Behind the Great Wall made its premier in New York City. It featured 31 odors and a slogan: “You must breathe it to believe it!”

Like Smell-O-Vision, AromaRama used a “scent track” to trigger the film’s odors. But there was a crucial difference: AromaRama spread its odors through the theater’s air conditioning system with Freon gas used to diffuse the smells. Unfortunately, it didn’t diffuse all that well—pungent aromas often hung malodorously in the air in a less-than-pleasing way. “A beautiful old pine grove in Peking smells rather like a subway rest room on disinfectant day,” wrote Time.

I wonder if we’ll look back on modern cinematic novelties with the same nostalgia.  We may find the current 3D fad just as dated as the Todd family’s “scent sensation”.  Where does novelty cross into being a valid new format?  It seems to me that it rests on the artist’s themselves being complacent to the process, marketing schemes cooked up by executives have an unmistakable smell to them.  Will filmmakers accept live performance as an element of their work?  It would have to be handled more gracefully than pumping whiffs of coffee into the air-conditioning.  But hell, we’re way ahead of the curve on this one.  Check out our technology…. 

Really, there’s no competition.

Before figuring out what’s happening there, it might make sense to look at when the picture was taken, hopefully this will tell us something about the goofy golf hats and that mini organ behind the rock.  That organ box is actually a harmonium, fairly popular at the time, a pedal powered reed instrument where the performer simultaneously pumps air to the bellows with his feet and plays the row of keys in front of him.  That strange accordion sound in the Beatles “We Can Work it Out” is evidence of a harmonium player pedaling away in the background.  They were popular across the world among chaplains who would tote their suitcase-sized wind boxes onto the battlefield to host impromptu services playing battle hymns and spirituals to soldiers in the field.

Recently my friend purchased an old harmonium at an antique store and I got a chance to play it, not only does it require your feet and hands to play, but the tone is controlled by metal bars that are pushed out by your knees as you play.  It’s the musical equivalent of an elliptical machine and even the simplest tunes require an awkward gyrating dance somewhere between an Elvis impersonation and a bike ride.  Its appeal is immediately obvious, you can pack it up in a rolling box and bring a mini, screeching primitive orchestra wherever you go, a one man band.  The Harmonium is an instrument made to make as much music as possible with as little as possible.  Harmoniums and organs in general were in high demand during the 1920′s as were their performers, often referred to rather unceremoniously as “operators” in magazine articles of the day.  The call for organists was immense as was the demand for manufacturing the instruments, upkeep and tuning of the pipes.  The 1920′s saw the creation of dedicated schools to train organists in major metropolitan centers (1 in Chicago, 1 in Boston and 2 in New York).   What was it that created such a massive demand for players, a massive demand for these mini-orchestras.

The Roxy Theatre Motion Picture Orchestra during a performance

This was the silent film era. Before synchronization of sound recordings and moving images changed the game, most movie screenings were paired with music ranging from a single pianist at a small town movie house to jumbo orchestras at the New York’s Roxy Theatre.  It’s hard to say why music was seen as necessary in the projection of moving pictures from the get-go.  Austrian composer Hanns Eisler penned his own guess in 1947:

“the pure cinema must have had a ghostly effect like that of the shadow play–shadows and ghosts have always been associated.  The major function of music…consisted in appeasing the evil spirits unconsciously dreaded’ the role of music in the silent film play, then, was to ‘exorcise fear or help the spectator absorb the shock’   – Hanns Eisler

Whether Eisler got it right in that rather dramatic proposal, these silent “ghosts” must still be with us, music is seen as almost inseparable from modern moving images.  What has changed and evolved however is the way that this music is created and distributed.  Movies were a hugely popular past-time, people went to the movies more frequently than they do in the 21st century.

Jean Paul Sarte gives this account of a trip to the movies

On rainy days, Anne Marie would ask me what I felt like doing. We would hesitate for a long time between the circus, the Châtelet, the Electric House, and the Grévin Museum. At the last moment, with calculated casualness, we would decide to go to the movies… The show had begun. We would stumblingly follow the usherette. I would feel I was doing something clandestine. Above our heads, a shaft of light crossed the hall; one could see dust and vapor dancing in it. A piano whinnied away…  Above all, I liked the incurable muteness of my heroes. But no, they weren’t mute, since they knew how to make themselves understood. We communicated by means of music; it was the sound of their inner life. Persecuted innocence did better than merely show or speak of suffering: it permeated me with its pain by means of the melody that issued from it. I would read the conversations, but I heard the hope and bitterness; I would perceive by ear the proud grief that remains silent. I was compromised; the young widow who wept on the screen was not I, and yet she and I had only one soul: Chopin’s funeral march; no more was needed for her tears to wet my eyes. I felt I was a prophet without being able to foresee anything: even before the traitor betrayed, his crime entered me; when all seemed peaceful in the castle, sinister chords exposed the murderer’s presence. How happy were those cowboys, those musketeers, those detectives: their future was there, in that premonitory music, and governed the present. An unbroken song blended with their lives, led them on to victory or death by moving toward its own end. They were expected: by the girl in danger, by the general, by the traitor lurking in the forest, by the friend who was tied up near a powder-keg and who sadly watched the flame run along the fuse. The course of that flame, the virgin’s desperate struggle against her abductor, the hero’s gallop across the plain, the interlacing of all those images, of all those speeds, and, beneath it all, the demonic movement of the “Race to the Abyss,” an orchestral selection taken from The Damnation of Faust and adapted for the piano, all of this was one and the same: it was Destiny.
The hero dismounted, put out the fuse, the traitor sprang at him, a duel with knives began: but the accidents of the duel likewise partook of the rigor of the musical development; they were fake accidents which ill concealed the universal order. What joy when the last knife stroke coincided with the last chord! I was utterly content, I had found the world in which I wanted to live, I touched the absolute. What an uneasy feeling when the lights went on: I had been wracked with love for the characters and they had disappeared, carrying their world with them. I had felt their victory in my bones; yet it was theirs and not mine. In the street I found myself superfluous.  – Jean Paul Sarte

Before movies with sound came along with the advent of “talkies” musicians were required at every movie house, organists being able to play many parts at once were in demand.  Special “theatre organs” were installed in movie houses with pipes that could make the sounds of trumpets, voices, woodwinds, even gunshots and other novelty effects.  Every film was a concert and live music saw it’s golden age.  Estimates are that musical accompaniment to film accounted for around half of all musical employment, which is an amazing figure when I think about it.

Bells, drums and whistles on a theatre organ

My musician friends, like myself, rely on all manner of musical and other work to make ends meet.  I don’t think that’s at all uncommon, most musicians today fall somewhere between amateur and semi-professional.  The most talented musicians in the area might be computer programmers or electricians by day and don their jazz-clarinet capes and tights in the evening to play their hearts out.  I think that having a job apart from music can make the art better and more enjoyable as it frees it from the financial pressure imposed by being full-time musician.  But what would it be like the other way around, what would it be like if our musicians had day jobs playing music as the musicians of the 1920′s did?  What if music were the bread and butter AND frosting?

Musicians will never again be needed to fill the sheer output that the silver screen demanded.  Novelty organs will never again replace orchestras to keep up with the call for live music.  That harmonium player would be less obtrusive in a Klezmer band than a contemporary cinema megaplex.  In 1929 the film Jazz Singer came along, this blockbuster synchronized sound and movies creating all kinds of new possibilities for filmmakers.  The transition came faster then anyone imagined, the novelty was so great that soon every movie was shown this way, in less than 2 years the musicians of the silent era were out of work for good.  Calling it a musical Armageddon may be a little melodramatic, but if we are willing to consider the musical working class of the 20th century “exorcists” then maybe we can get away calling the end of the era an Armageddon.

Clearly the movie house workers were beaten out by a new technology and means of distribution, but music recording on the whole doesn’t seem to stop people from going out to see their favorite artists in person.  What makes live performance irreplaceable?  I can think of some reasons for myself that live performance is “better” than just sitting at home and listening to the CD, I bet it’s different for each person though.  There’s something that a live performance can do that “canned” music can’t touch.  LPs, CDs, MP3, Napster, ITunes are part of a long conga-line of technologies making musical recordings cheaper and more accessible.  We finally may be maxed out at how much music we can possibly listen to, it’s becoming so easy to find music and recordings that the market value of recorded music has been on a downhill slope since the 80s.  Many musicians are now looking at live performance as the only viable way to make living that isn’t going to change every time record companies figure out new ways of packaging and distributing their music.  Maybe we’ll see a resurgence of live music in coming years, maybe it’s already happening.

Now Back to this…

The caption of this picture places it at 1925 on the set of a motion picture called sun-up.  The harmonium player and violinist are playing music for the actors during a shot.  They were not being recorded, synchronized sound is still 5 years off, they are just playing for the benefit of the actors. Turns out this way very common, check out these pictures of other musicians playing on the set on silent films.

So-called mood musicians were commonplace and many thought that actors would be unable to emote without their musical contribution.  Some stars even demanded that they were on set for their scenes and requested specific music.

I love the expression on that guy’s face, hanging off a false-cliff.  Maybe it was a death scene, maybe a romantic one.

I’m coming back from a late night showing at the Hollywood Theatre.  Portland is a quiet city, and biking in the rain is a somber trip.  No matter who you go with, the movies are always a singular experience, just you and the big  screen, it is a little spooky in a way.  It’s late, there are very few cars out, and a fog hangs down from the yellow streetlights.  I’m comforted by knowing my next stop; Mississippi Pizza, where I’ll be seeing my friends band in their first performance.  The warmth of food and bodies is comforting.  Images of the movie I just saw are flashing in my head, and also this picture.

Phonographs existed in the 1925, in fact they were hugely popular.  But still the mood-musicians would trek out into the wilderness to do what a phonograph couldn’t.  Maybe that’s it; they may be as scared of Eisler’s ghosts as I am.

- Galen Huckins