Capitol: Shhh! Alloy Orchestra rankles silent-film purists w

[silentfilm]

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/c ... ive-scores

By Zachary Woolfe

9:15 am Feb. 2, 2011 |

About a dozen years ago, Anthology Film Archives, the eminent screening house on Second Avenue and Second Street, was having a festival of silent films. In keeping with its general practice, the films were presented without musical accompaniment.

After one of the screenings, a pleasant man approached Robert Haller, Anthology’s director of collections, offering to accompany a few of the upcoming films on piano for a mere hundred dollars. Haller figured, why not? When the appointed evening came, he settled into his seat, the lights dimmed, and then his troubles began. The music had no sense of connection to the themes and pacing of the film; there were "Mickey Mouses"—the cheap effects that accompany an opening door, say, with a hokey creak—galore.

"I was horrified when I heard what this guy was doing to the films," Haller recalled in a phone interview yesterday, his voice shaking with remembered rage. "I didn’t want to make a scandal, but I really wanted to get up and throw the guy out of the theater. It was a massacre. He was massacring visually strong films."

There are indeed people who care deeply about whether, and how, silent films should be accompanied by music.

"It’s one of those things that’s oddly contentious," Ken Winokur said with a slightly weary laugh. Winokur is one of the three members of Alloy Orchestra, a three-man ensemble that has devoted itself to developing and performing new scores for the films of the silent era, and he is therefore a defender of the necessity of the music.

"These films were always intended to be performed with a score," he said by phone from his home in Cambridge. "The timing of silent films depended on there being another source of information and entertainment that’s going on simultaneous to the image. Without that going on in the background, the films are only half there, and I think they’re really dull. I really don’t like watching the films with no score."

During the silent film era, almost every screening had live musical accompaniment, though there was little uniformity to the music. At important theaters, there were often full orchestras, but as films toured to smaller venues, there were smaller ensembles, or just solo pianists, and after all who knows what they were playing? Some films had nothing, and others had just vague musical suggestions or outlines. Even if the film had a written score, that wouldn’t necessarily be what accompanists would play.

"It might be ragtime guys who only played ragtime regardless of what was on the screen," Winokur said. "But of course everybody’s an expert and knows that a particular film can only be heard with this particular score. It’s a little ridiculous because that’s not how it worked in the silent era."

Not having any music at all is an idea that originated in the '40s and '50s with the film theorist Andre Bazin, who wrote that since it had grown impossible to recreate the period of their creation, silent films should be viewed silently. Accompaniment was a simple-minded nostalgia trip, a dinky piano player whose goal was to make the films more comfortable and less rigorous.

Many people agreed with Winokur, though, and found the idea of utterly silent films thoroughly dull. So the music largely persisted, some of it good and some less good. When Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis was rereleased in 1984, for instance, it had a score by Giorgio Moroder that featured disco-flavored pop music from Pat Benatar, Adam Ant, Freddie Mercury, and others. Look!

In fact it was Moroder’s audacious intervention that spurred the formation of Alloy Orchestra. Winokur and two fellow musicians, percussionist Terry Donahue and keyboardist Caleb Sampson, had played together in bands and on some adventurous performance-art projects. They were particularly interested in building new instruments, and exploring the percussive effects of found junk. The owner of a local art house heard them play at an outdoor event in Boston on New Year’s Eve in 1991. He was about to present Metropolis, but disliked Moroder’s pop music, and asked Winokur, Donahue, and Sampson if they could write an alternative score. In just two weeks, the band pulled it together.

"We composed a lot of songs but did them in a fairly open way, with improvisation," Winokur said. "We did a weekend’s worth of shows, and during the first show, we looked at each other and just said, ‘Damn, this is good.’ Doing live accompaniment to silent film, where there’s this beautiful image up on the screen, was extremely wonderful."

The Metropolis score featured the group’s specialty, an insistent, even menacing percussive drive, but on their next film, the Lillian Gish vehicle The Wind, the group explored a greater range of effects. They became regulars at the Telluride Film Festival, and have played over a thousand shows. (Sampson died in 1999 and was replaced by Roger Miller.) Working in a lengthy, cue-by-cue process that balances detailed planning and improvisation, they’ve done scores for 23 full-length features and almost as many shorts. Tonight they start a free three-night stand at the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden.

"We have a lot of styles," Winokur said, "that vary wildly from film to film. The films speak to us and tell us how they need to be scored. The Black Pirate"—the Douglas Fairbanks vehicle that screens on Friday—"is so deadly serious that it becomes funny. It’s very intentionally working on the edge of farce. Everything is done very seriously, and we play pretty serious music, but everything’s heightened to a level beyond reasonable. We think it becomes funny by exaggerating the seriousness of it."

Speedy, which screens on Thursday, is Alloy’s most complex score; Harold Lloyd’s brief scenes and abrupt transitions make it difficult to sustain a riff. Alloy got into more comedic films later on, after having initially been associated with avant-garde works like Dziga Vertov’s 1928 The Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov was a pioneering Constructivist noise composer in addition to being an experimental filmmaker, and Alloy’s propulsive, almost dance-y score, based on Vertov’s instructions, feels right for both the film’s era and our own.

The trailer for their Nosferatu indicates a score with Survivor-esque driving beats but also a genuine creepiness, the kind of brutally scary music that Scorsese recently used to good, if occasionally campy, effect in Shutter Island.

"There’s a lot of debate in the silent film world about how much one should step forward and how much one should step back," Winokur said. "We’re known as being a group that steps forward. Our music is bold, and sometimes very lively, and sometimes very loud. It isn’t this kind of shrinking violet. Silent films can actually benefit from exciting music that calls attention to itself."

No less a critic than Roger Ebert has called them "the best in the world" at what they do, but Alloy still experiences disappointments. Their churning, ominous score for Metropolis had become one of the major alternative options, until the original Gottfried Huppertz score was discovered and included on the film’s most recent DVD rerelease.

"We got knocked off our pedestal because they found the original score," Winokur said ruefully. They got achingly close to being the secondary track on the DVD—even recording and mixing it—before word came from the German copyright holder that it wouldn’t be included. Rights issues like these are the bane of the silent film orchestra, along with neo-Bazinites who want audiences to watch Maria Falconetti’s Joan of Arc get tormented in silence, without a note of the lush choral score that’s become standard.

"In theory, that’s fine, but in practice, it’s a really poor idea," Winokur said. "I understand the frustration. Not every score is great. There’s stuff that’s awful, and there’s stuff that’s not to individual taste. People listen to our scores and they say, ‘This isn’t traditional, it takes me out of the time period I want to be sinking into,’ and they don’t like them. Other people say, ‘It’s nice that they brought a fresh approach to this, I think they brought the film experience of the twenties into the present day."

Tonight, Alloy plays along to three shorts by Chaplin, Keaton, and "Fatty" Arbuckle. Anthology’s Robert Haller isn’t keen on that idea.

"My general reaction is that Keaton doesn’t need sound of any kind," he said. "He’s stronger in a condition of silence. Chaplin as well. They are such strong visual performers and directors. The emphasis a pianist or small orchestra could give would be incongruous with what Chaplin or Keaton or other experienced subtle filmmakers could want to do with it."

Not that he’s an enemy of film music—it’s one of his great loves—or even all silent film accompaniments. He spoke about some of his favorite film scores, the ones that effortlessly conjure up the images they accompanied, but added that there were other scores that somehow managed to make an impression entirely on their own.

He thought of an example. "It's called the Da Vinci something?" he said.

Code?

"Right, The Da Vinci Code. It's a melodramatic film, and it's not very good, but that doesn’t change the fact that Hans Zimmer’s music just runs away with the film. When I play the Da Vinci Code music, and I do it a lot, I don’t associate it with images from the film."

In the end, while there’s little chance of another experiment in accompaniment at Anthology, Haller expressed cautious optimism about Alloy’s festival.

"I have heard good things about Alloy Orchestra," he said. "I assume that they don’t fall back on standard melodies that just smack of pop culture at the end of the 20th century rather than melodies that would be associated with the period of the films. I believe that Alloy has repeatedly seen the films that they’re accompanying. I have every reason to assume they do not massacre the films."

[gjohnson]

I never realize there once was an actual movement among cinephiles to show silent films totally silent. They should of stuck with The Auteur Theory. That's crazy talk. But it may explain why attending the Walker Art museum in Mpls during my formative years they would sometimes have musical accompaniment and sometimes not. If I walked in and didn't see a piano nearby my heart would sink.

I was 20 the first time I watched a complete showing of INTOLERENCE. It was at the Walker and they decided that this film would work best in total silence. It was mid winter and a snowstorm was raging outside, so for three plus hours a group of us sat in silence watching Griffith's masterpiece unspool to our own musical accompaniment of coughs, sniffles, and blowing of the nose. The noise was overwhelming. We sounded like we all belonged in the IC unit at Lincoln Memorial. The Bayer Aspirin company could of recorded our soundtrack to use for their next cold relief commercial. I was probably the lead conductor of this particular orchestra since I had a habit of basically coming down with walking phenomena at the beginning of every winter which would last until sometime around Easter.

But despite the cacophony of coughs that day I still recall walking out of that theater impressed with what I saw on the screen. Maybe the Alloy group could consider using flu-like symptoms into their next orchestration?

[Scoundrel]

Didn't Henri Langlois also believe in showing silent films without background music...?

If you want coughs, listen to some of the historic recordings of the Berlin Philharmonic under Furtwangler.

[Penfold]

I've certainly always associated the practice with the Cinematheque Francaise.....there are good scores and bad scores, but I've never heard a score that I wished would stop....
.....although I was far from impressed by the Alloy's for The General...it flattened every laugh in its path.

[Richard M Roberts]

I never realize there once was an actual movement among cinephiles to show silent films totally silent. They should of stuck with The Auteur Theory. That's crazy talk. But it may explain why attending the Walker Art museum in Mpls during my formative years they would sometimes have musical accompaniment and sometimes not. If I walked in and didn't see a piano nearby my heart would sink.

I was 20 the first time I watched a complete showing of INTOLERENCE. It was at the Walker and they decided that this film would work best in total silence. It was mid winter and a snowstorm was raging outside, so for three plus hours a group of us sat in silence watching Griffith's masterpiece unspool to our own musical accompaniment of coughs, sniffles, and blowing of the nose. The noise was overwhelming. We sounded like we all belonged in the IC unit at Lincoln Memorial. The Bayer Aspirin company could of recorded our soundtrack to use for their next cold relief commercial. I was probably the lead conductor of this particular orchestra since I had a habit of basically coming down with walking phenomena at the beginning of every winter which would last until sometime around Easter.

But despite the cacophony of coughs that day I still recall walking out of that theater impressed with what I saw on the screen. Maybe the Alloy group could consider using flu-like symptoms into their next orchestration?

All of the Alloy's music reminds me of flu-like symptoms. So they are one more thing we can blame the Moroder score for METROPOLIS for.

RICHARD M ROBERTS

[jessica]

With all due respect the original score of METROPOLIS was NEVER lost. It was not used for many years because the film was PD and incomplete. As soon as the film was restored in Germany in 2002 the original score was used and put on both the print , the VHS and DVD. The Alloy used their score for a number of live engagements and it was very popular as is their playing with new restoration. However their use of the score either live or the refusal of the rights holders to include on the most recent DVD was not because the original score was ever lost or found.

[Mike Gebert]

Whatever else you may think of them, their Weill-esque score for Underworld is outstanding, and my preferred choice for that film. You can hear a bit of it here CORRECTION: NO YOU CAN'T, SEE BELOW:

http://www.criterion.com/films/21766-underworld

Even if you don't care for them on comedies, say, they suit the Germanic-gangstery tone of the film very well.

[Gagman 66]

Mike,

I clicked on the link, but it started playing the Robert Israel score.

[Mike Gebert]

ARRRRH!

I hate the menus on these discs-- it absolutely looks to me like you're selecting something by lighting it up, but you're actually selecting the one that gets darker, and the other one lights up as a result. So you are correct, that's the Israel score. There's no way to hear a bit of the Alloy score online that I know of. Forget I brought it up.

[Shaynes3]

(SNIP)

neo-Bazinites who want audiences to watch Maria Falconetti’s Joan of Arc get tormented in silence, without a note of the lush choral score that’s become standard.

(SNIP again)

Anthology’s Robert Haller isn’t keen on that idea.

"My general reaction is that Keaton doesn’t need sound of any kind,"

Sorry - I know it's all supposed to be a matter of personal opinion/taste, but the idea that watching silent films without music can be summed up in two words: incredibly stupid!

Sure, you may see a film from time to time with a score you don't think works all that well, but silence does more damage that almost any imaginable score (and I've heard some on DVD that I really didn't like - Chaney in THE PENALTY, anyone?)

[jessica]

FYI Anthology is notorious for running foreign language prints without subtitles claiming that is how they were meant to be seen and the titles would
detract from the film.

[Murnau]

I have seen Kino's <b>The Penalty</b> and the score was quite horrible but it’s better than nothing. Finnish Film Archive presents silent movies totally silent but like Shaynes3 said it is much better to watch silent movie with horrible score than no score at all. I have found only one exception: Dovzhenko’s <b>Arsenal</b> works just fine with the powerful images, it won’t need any score.

[FrankFay]

Alloy scores can be fine with the right picture- Their score for THE LOST WORLD is rather jarring when you compare it to the Robert Israel score but it suits the quirky and unreal nature of the lost world scenes quite well.

Their score for MANSLAUGHTER is hit or miss- not bad except for the odd musical saw-like effect during the dramatic scenes.

Robert Israel isn't perfect either- sometimes he gets a bit bogged down with period correctness, though over time his scores have a slightly looser feel. He's always listenable in any case.

Sometimes Carl Davis can get so lush he pulls attention from the film- I wonder if he's capable of using anything less that a full orchestra?

[Mike Gebert]

Sometimes Carl Davis can get so lush he pulls attention from the film- I wonder if he's capable of using anything less that a full orchestra?

I'm not wild about Davis for comedies. I feel like he scores comedies as if he mistakes them for sweet pieces of Americana and doesn't realize they have jokes, too. Keaton especially shouldn't be treated as if he were True Heart Susie. Conversely, when a movie actually does have those qualities, he's very good at it...

[boblipton]

I've certainly always associated the practice with the Cinematheque Francaise.....there are good scores and bad scores, but I've never heard a score that I wished would stop....
.....although I was far from impressed by the Alloy's for The General...it flattened every laugh in its path.

Maria Newman.

As for the rest, it simply indicates that different people have different strengths and weaknesses.

Bob

[WaverBoy]

Sometimes Carl Davis can get so lush he pulls attention from the film- I wonder if he's capable of using anything less that a full orchestra?

I'm not wild about Davis for comedies. I feel like he scores comedies as if he mistakes them for sweet pieces of Americana and doesn't realize they have jokes, too. Keaton especially shouldn't be treated as if he were True Heart Susie. Conversely, when a movie actually does have those qualities, he's very good at it...

Carl Davis' scores for SAFETY LAST! and THE KID BROTHER are top-notch, and fit the films perfectly in my opinion, slapstick bits as well as sentiment. My fave Davis score is for IT, just an absolutely perfect accompaniment to one of the greatest silent romantic comedies. His scores for the Chaplin Mutuals, however, are an almost total disappointment. Real head-scratchers, those scores. I don't get it.

[WaverBoy]

Sorry - I know it's all supposed to be a matter of personal opinion/taste, but the idea that watching silent films without music can be summed up in two words: incredibly stupid!

Sure, you may see a film from time to time with a score you don't think works all that well, but silence does more damage that almost any imaginable score (and I've heard some on DVD that I really didn't like - Chaney in THE PENALTY, anyone?)

The "score" for THE PENALTY doesn't qualify as imaginable; I couldn't possibly imagine a film accompaniment that horrible, and yet there it is. The film plays much better silent. And ditto for the Maria Newman "scores" that serve as dealbreakers for a couple of Milestone's otherwise excellent Mary Pickford DVDs.

[Gagman 66]

Speedy,

That's why I compiled my own score to THE PENALTY. But that was at least 2 years ago, and it probably needs a fair amount of revision. I have since used many of the same themes with other films far more effectively I believe. Here is a glimpse and a listen. See what you think?


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[realist]

I can still remember attending my first silent film showing at the University of Minnesota-Duluth in late 1969. It was the "Hunchback of Notre Dame." It truly was silent and a total bore. I thought this is a disgrace to the film as it was truly meant to be shown. I got together with fellow film buffs and formed a film society which lasted beyond my four years of college. We showed many classics of the silent era and all had music to go with the picture. A couple of times we hired live musicians. Long live the proper presentation of the classics films of the past!

[Rob Farr]

Carl Davis' scores for SAFETY LAST! and THE KID BROTHER are top-notch, and fit the films perfectly in my opinion, slapstick bits as well as sentiment. My fave Davis score is for IT, just an absolutely perfect accompaniment to one of the greatest silent romantic comedies. His scores for the Chaplin Mutuals, however, are an almost total disappointment. Real head-scratchers, those scores. I don't get it.

I copied the Davis Chaplin Mutual scores to my iPod because they work better divorced from Chaplin's images. My favorite example of Davis's cognitive dissonance is the lush, romantic "Hollywood" theme for the shabby, two-bit Lockstone studio in "Behind the Screen".

[barafan]

Well, count me in as a fan of Davis' scores for Ben-Hur and It. I actually find "The Chariot Race" to be excellent music for a run.

I will say I didn't know there was a school of thought suggesting watching silent films in total silence. Seems silly to me.

[Mike Gebert]

The weirdest score I ever heard was a German-language print of Nosferatu distributed by some German cultural organization, shown with, I kid you not, bebop jazz. Count Orlok is slithering along and the music is drums going chik-chika-chik chika-chik-chika-chik badum pow!

I always assumed that organizations showing silents silently were simply unable to afford accompanists. (That was certainly the case when I showed them in college, they were guaranteed money-losers anyway outside the comedy classics and a few others, and tossing in another $100 for an accompanist was pain that would have put the idea of showing silents at all up for question.) It didn't help that companies like Films Inc. would state in their catalogs that their versions had scores, and they would turn out not to. Many rude surprises over the years like that-- one time in desperation the projectionist threw on our ragtime tape (emergency accompaniment for comedy shorts) for an unexpectedly silent print of Wings, and eventually patrons came out and asked that it be turned off in light of the fact that characters were dying on screen. (I had one other protest over the years-- some complaints when I used some Philip Glass music for one part of Berlin, Symphony of a City. Didn't you see Koyaanisqatsi? Couldn't have fit better, even if you can't stand his music...)

It does seem as if, in the post-Napoleon world, silent screenings of silents have become rare, and when silents are shown, it's with the expectation that you're seeing a musical performance as much as a cinematic one. The last utterly silent silent I saw in Chicago was probably a Garbo silent at Facets in the mid-90s sometime.

However, I did watch a silent in silence the other night, a disc of Woman of the World I'd bought at one of the film conventions. I got an immediate Proustian flashback to watching 8mm Blackhawk prints on my wall...

[rogerskarsten]

The first (and so far, only) time that I saw Pabst's DIE BÜCHSE DER PANDORA was in the Arsenal Kino (connected with the Deutsche Kinemathek) in Berlin. The Arsenal sometimes has live musical accompaniment for its silent screenings (often performed by the excellent Eunice Martins), but this time, the film was shown without a score. On top of that, since the print was a restoration from Bologna and had Italian intertitles, a translator spoke into a microphone during the screening to provide the German translation.

It was still one of my most involving experiences of seeing a silent film.

I have had several other experiences of watching silent films without a score, and I must say, I don't have a problem with it. Films that are crafted well (i.e., edited well) possess a rhythm of their own that is discernible even without a score. I assume, after all, that most of the original film editors and directors assembled the film without consideration to whatever music would eventually be married to it. (An exception, of course, could be found in cases such as Lang-Huppertz, who I believe worked closely together). If film is foremost a visual medium, then the true test of a well-made film should be how well it plays without sound, right?

~Roger

P.S. I had the chance to attend a screening of THE BLACK PIRATE a few years ago, when the Alloy Orchestra was in Minneapolis. I thought their interpretation was excellent.

[Frederica]

P.S. I had the chance to attend a screening of THE BLACK PIRATE a few years ago, when the Alloy Orchestra was in Minneapolis. I thought their interpretation was excellent.

I enjoyed Alloy's The Black Pirate a few years ago, at the Goldwyn. Their score for Man with a Movie Camera was a knockout at SFSFF last year, completely fabulous.

[Harlett O'Dowd]

Well, count me in as a fan of Davis' scores for Ben-Hur and It. I actually find "The Chariot Race" to be excellent music for a run.

I will say I didn't know there was a school of thought suggesting watching silent films in total silence. Seems silly to me.

His score for Four Horsemen almost knocked me out of my seat ... literally.

The very walls seemed to shake when it ran at Cinecon too many years ago. Just an amazing achievement.

[Gagman 66]

Carl Davis best scores are probably for THE BIG PARADE, OLD HEIDELBERG, WINGS, THE WEDDING MARCH, INTOLERANCE, THE GODLESS GIRL, and THE THIEF OF BAGDAD. None of which are available on DVD. Neither is THE EAGLE or as was mentioned previously, THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE, Nor NAPOLEON. While it was great getting his scores for THE GENERAL and OUR HOSPITALITY included on the Kino Blu-ray's it doesn't really mark any improvement of the number of his scores released on DVD? Since those had previously been offered on Region 2 releases. Still lots of scores of his that are not being heard much.

[rudyfan]

Carl Davis best scores are probably for THE BIG PARADE, OLD HEIDELBERG, WINGS, THE WEDDING MARCH, INTOLERANCE, THE GODLESS GIRL, and THE THIEF OF BAGDAD. None of which are available on DVD. Neither is THE EAGLE or as was mentioned previously, THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE, Nor NAPOLEON. While it was great getting his scores for THE GENERAL and OUR HOSPITALITY included on the Kino Blu-ray's it doesn't really mark any improvement of the number of his scores released on DVD? Since those had previously been offered on Region 2 releases. Still lots of scores of his that are not being heard much.

Again, this costs money, you know, royalties for his compositions.

[Harlett O'Dowd]

Carl Davis best scores are probably for THE BIG PARADE, OLD HEIDELBERG, WINGS, THE WEDDING MARCH, INTOLERANCE, THE GODLESS GIRL, and THE THIEF OF BAGDAD. None of which are available on DVD. Neither is THE EAGLE or as was mentioned previously, THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE, Nor NAPOLEON. While it was great getting his scores for THE GENERAL and OUR HOSPITALITY included on the Kino Blu-ray's it doesn't really mark any improvement of the number of his scores released on DVD? Since those had previously been offered on Region 2 releases. Still lots of scores of his that are not being heard much.

Again, this costs money, you know, royalties for his compositions.

Yep, pony up the royalties cost and you can have them

[Arndt]

Carl Davis is going to conduct an orchestra playing his score for INTOLERANCE in Luxemburg on 2 April this year. All going well I'll be there.

[Frederica]

Carl Davis is going to conduct an orchestra playing his score for INTOLERANCE in Luxemburg on 2 April this year. All going well I'll be there.

Are you getting in for free?