Buster Keaton is considered one of the greatest comic actors of all time. His influence on physical comedy is rivaled only by Charlie Chaplin. Like many of the great actors of the silent era, Keaton’s work was cast into near obscurity for many years. Only toward the end of his life was there a renewed interest in his films. An acrobatically skillful and psychologically insightful actor, Keaton made dozens of short films and fourteen major silent features, attesting to one of the most talented and innovative artists of his time.

Born in 1895 to Joe and Myra Keaton, Joseph Francis Keaton got his name when, at six months, he fell down a flight of stairs. Reaching the bottom unhurt and relatively undisturbed, he was picked up by Harry Houdini who said the kid could really take a “buster,” or fall. From then on, his parents and the world knew him as Buster Keaton. By the age of three, Keaton joined the family’s vaudeville act, which was renamed The Three Keatons. For years he was knocked over, thrown through windows, dropped down stairs, and essentially used as a living prop. It was this training in vaudeville that prepared him for the fast-paced slapstick comedy of the silent movies.

When, in 1917, his father’s drinking broke up the act, Keaton moved to Hollywood, where a chance meeting brought him contact with another former vaudevillian. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, one of the most famous of the comic actors of the time, took Keaton on and showed him the ropes of the movie industry. For the rest of his life, Keaton would acknowledge Arbuckle as one of his closest friends and his greatest influence. With his deadpan humor and exceptional acrobatic technique, the lanky Keaton was a perfect partner for Arbuckle’s clumsy antics. The audience agreed, and within a few years, Keaton had acquired the notoriety to move out on his own.

The bulk of Keaton’s major work was done during the 1920s. Writing, directing, and staring in these films, Keaton created a world unlike the other comic stars of the times. Where Harold Lloyd battled physical adversity trying to make it to the top, and Charlie Chaplin avoided catastrophe through luck and good will, Keaton was an observer, a traveler caught up in his surroundings. He often found himself in the same compromising circumstances as Chaplin and Lloyd (chased by an angry crowd, left behind by a train), but he maintained a sense of even composure throughout. No matter how lost or downtrodden Keaton seemed to be, he was never one to be pitied. The NEW YORK TIMES said of him, “In a film world that exaggerated everything, and in which every emotion was dramatized and elaborated, he remained impassive and solemn, his poker-faced inscrutability suppressing all emotion.” It was this “stone face,” however, that came to represent a sense of optimism and everlasting inquisitiveness.

In films such as THE NAVIGATOR (1924), THE GENERAL (1926), AND THE CAMERAMAN (1928), Keaton portrayed characters whose physical abilities seemed completely contingent on their surroundings. Considered one of the greatest acrobatic actors, Keaton could step on or off a moving train with the smoothness of getting out of bed. Often at odds with the physical world, his ability to naively adapt brought a melancholy sweetness to the films. The subtlety of the work, however, left Keaton behind the more popular Chaplin and Lloyd. By the 1930s, the studio felt it was in their best interest to take control of his films. No longer writing or directing, Keaton continued to work at a grueling pace. Not understanding the complexity of his genius, they wrote for him simple characters that only took advantage of the most basic of his skills. For Keaton, as for many of the silent movie stars, the final straw was the advent of the talkies.

Though he acted in a number of films in the ’30s (often alongside Jimmy Durante), Keaton no longer possessed the stoic charm many had grown to love. He worked as an uncredited writer for the Marx Brothers and Red Skelton, eking out a living at a fraction of his former salary. He began drinking and through the ’40s did very little work of serious interest. It was not until 1953, and his appearance in Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT that the public revival of Keaton’s work began. More than simply a nostalgia for the old days, this new interest encouraged Keaton to revive his career with frequent appearances on television. The sheer ability of his acrobatics astounded audiences who had become used to less sophisticated physical comedy, and by the 1960s, his films were returning to the theaters and he was being hailed as the greatest actor of the silent era.

In 1966, after finishing work on Richard Lester’s A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, Buster Keaton died at the age of sixty-nine. His career spanned six decades and touched the lives of millions of people. He had worked with everyone from Marlene Dietrich to Samuel Beckett, Cecil B. DeMille to Tony Randall, and had maintained a seemingly selfless composure throughout. For many, this deadpan style was a poignant reminder of the fragility of life in the age of complex and overwhelming machines. Today, more than thirty years after his death, Buster Keaton’s films seem as funny, touching, and relevant as ever.

David Abelevich Kaufman (Russian: Дави́д А́белевич Ка́уфман) (2 January 1896 – 12 February 1954), better known by his pseudonym Dziga Vertov (Russian: Дзи́га Ве́ртов), was a Soviet pioneer documentary film, newsreel director and cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the Cinéma vérité style of documentary moviemaking and, in particular the Dziga Vertov Group active in the 1960s.

Born David Abelevich Kaufman (Russian: Давид А́белевич Кауфман) into a family of Jewish intellectuals[citation needed] in Białystok, Poland, then a part of the Russian Empire. His father was a librarian. He Russified his Jewish name David[citation needed] and patronymic Abelevich to Denis Arkadievich at some point after 1918. Kaufman studied music at Białystok Conservatory until his family fled from the invading German army to Moscow in 1915. The Kaufmans soon settled in Petrograd, where Denis Kaufman began writing poetry, science fiction and satire. In 1916-1917 Kaufman was studying medicine at the Psychoneurological Institute in Saint Petersburg and experimenting with “sound collages” in his free time. Kaufman adopted the name “Dziga Vertov” (which translates loosely as ‘spinning top’); Vertov’s political writings and his work on the Kino-Pravda newsreel series show a revolutionary romanticism.

Early Writings

Vertov is known for many early writings, mainly while still in school, that focus on the individual versus the perceptive nature of the camera lens, which he was known to call his “second eye”.

Most of Vertov’s early work was unpublished, and few manuscripts remain after the Second World War, though some material survived in later films and documentaries created by Vertov and his brothers, Boris Kaufman and Mikhail Kaufman.

Vertov is also known for quotes on perception, and its ineffability, in relation to the nature of qualia (sensory experiences).

Career after the October Revolution

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, at the age of 22, Vertov began editing for Kino-Nedelya (Кино-Неделя, the Moscow Cinema Committee’s weekly film series, and the first newsreel series in Russia), which first came out in June 1918. While working for Kino-Nedelya he met his future wife, the film director and editor, Elizaveta Svilova, who at the time was working as an editor at Goskino. She began collaborating with Vertov, beginning as his editor but becoming assistant and co-director in subsequent films, such as Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and Three Songs About Lenin (1934).

Dziga Vertov with his brother, Mikhail Kaufman
Vertov worked on the Kino-Nedelya series for three years, helping establish and run a film-car on Mikhail Kalinin’s agit-train during the ongoing Russian Civil War between Communists and counterrevolutionaries. Some of the cars on the agit-trains were equipped with actors for live performances or printing presses; Vertov’s had equipment to shoot, develop, edit, and project film. The trains went to battlefronts on agitation-propaganda missions intended primarily to bolster the morale of the troops; they were also intended to stir up revolutionary fervor of the masses.

In 1919, Vertov compiled newsreel footage for his documentary Anniversary of the Revolution; in 1921 he compiled History of the Civil War. The so-called “Council of Three,” a group issuing manifestoes in LEF, a radical Russian newsmagazine, was established in 1922; the group’s “three” were Vertov, his (future) wife and editor Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother and cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman. Vertov’s interest in machinery led to a curiosity about the mechanical basis of cinema.

Man with a Movie Camera

With Lenin’s admission of limited private enterprise through his New Economic Policy (NEP), Russia began receiving fiction films from afar, an occurrence that Vertov regarded with undeniable suspicion, calling drama a “corrupting influence” on the proletarian sensibility (“On ‘Kinopravda,’” 1924). By this time Vertov had been using his newsreel series as a pedestal to vilify dramatic fiction for several years; he continued his criticisms even after the warm reception of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin in 1925. Potemkin was a heavily fictionalized film telling the story of a mutiny on a battleship which came about as a result of the sailors’ mistreatment; the film was an obvious but skillful propaganda piece glorifying the proletariat. Vertov lost his job at Sovkino in January 1927, possibly as a result of criticizing a film which effectively preaches the line of the Communist Party. He was fired for creating “A Sixth Part of the World: Advertising and the Soviet Universe” for the State Trade Organization into a propaganda film, selling the Soviet as an advanced society under the New Economic Policy of Lenin, instead of showing how they fit into the world economy. The Ukraine State Studio hired Vertov to create Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov says in his essay “The Man with a Movie Camera” that he was fighting “for a decisive cleaning up of film-language, for its complete separation from the language of theater and literature.”[4] By the later segments of “Kino-Pravda,” Vertov was experimenting heavily, looking to abandon what he considered film clichés (and receiving criticism for it); his experimentation was even more pronounced and dramatic by the time of Man with the Movie Camera (filmed in the Ukraine). Some have criticized the obvious stagings in Man With the Movie Camera as being at odds with Vertov’s credos “life as it is” and “life caught unawares”: the scene of the woman getting out of bed and getting dressed is obviously staged, as is the reversed shot of the chess pieces being pushed off a chess board and the tracking shot which films Mikhail Kaufman riding in a car filming a third car.

However, Vertov’s two credos, often used interchangeably, are in fact distinct, as Yuri Tsivian points out in the commentary track on the DVD for Man with the Movie Camera: for Vertov, “life as it is” means to record life as it would be without the camera present. “Life caught unawares” means to record life when surprised, and perhaps provoked, by the presence of a camera (16:04 on the commentary track). This explanation contradicts the common assumption that for Vertov “life caught unawares” meant “life caught unaware of the camera.” All of these shots might conform to Vertov’s credo “caught unawares.” Dziga’s slow motion, fast motion, and other camera techniques were a way to dissect the image, Vertov’s brother Mikhail described in an interview. It was to be the honest truth of perception. For example, in Man with a Movie Camera, two trains are shown almost melting into each other, although we are taught to see trains as not riding that close, Vertov tried to portray the actual sight of two passing trains. Mikhail talked about Eisenstein’s films as different from his and his brother Vertov’s in that Eisenstein, “came from the theatre, in the theatre one directs dramas, one strings beads.” “We all felt…that through documentary film we could develop a new kind of art. Not only documentary art, or the art of chronicle, but rather an art based on images, the creation of an image-oriented journalism” Mikhail explained. More than even film truth, Man with a Movie Camera, was supposed to be a way to make those in the Soviet Union more efficient in their actions. He slowed down his actions, such as the decision whether to jump or not, you can see the decision in his face, a psychological dissection for the audience. He wanted a peace between the actions of man and the actions of a machine, for them to be, in a sense, one.

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