Pleased to post about a trio of special silent film events in the coming months.
• Starting on Sunday, June 18, I'm contributing live music to an extensive summer-long retrospective of the work of director Ernst Lubitsch at the Harvard Film Archive.
• On Sunday, July 9, at a 35mm screening of the great Harold Lloyd comedy 'Safety Last' (1923), I'll be collaborating on the accompaniment with a local Dixieland group, "Sammy and the Late Risers."
• And this weekend marks the first of two visits to Toronto, Ontario for silent film music. First up is Cecil B. DeMille's early shocker 'The Cheat' (1915) at the Revue Cinema.
Then, on Saturday, Aug. 19, it's music for 'Snow White' (1916) at the Toronto International Film Festival Cinematheque.
I'll details of these adventures as they come up. But the nice thing is that each of these projects shows an awareness of the importance of live music in the silent film experience.
In the case of the Harvard Film Archive, the Lubitsch "That Certain Feeling" series includes something like 20 silent titles. Programmer David Pendleton has arranged for live music for all of them, using pianists Martin Marks and Robert Humphreville in addition to me.
And if that weren't enough, the Archive is also running a Jean Renoir retrospective this summer that includes about a half-dozen silent titles, with accompaniment duties handled by Bertrand Laurence.
It's quite a heavy load, but David and his colleagues are committed to including live music as an integral part of the silent cinema experience. And it's great that they make use of a variety of musicians with different accompanying styles. Hoping to get down to Cambridge for a few screenings I'm not accompanying so I can take in how others do it.
It's one thing for a university-affiliated archive to program silents with live music. But it's a whole other kettle of fish for a first-run commercial moviehouse to run silent film with live music.
But that's been the case for some years now at the Somerville Theatre, where manage Ian Judge, projectionista David Kornfeld, and the rest of the team program centry-old classics alongside the current season's blockbusters.
I can't imagine it's a huge money-maker for the theater, which isn't part of any chain. But it's a truly distinctive element of its programming, and over the years the "Silent, Please!" series has been running, we've built up something of an audience.
Still, I was gratified to find the Somerville completely in support taking things to a new level, musically, by working with an actual Dixieland Band to do music for 'Safety Last' in July.
Ian Judge didn't even hesitate. The response: Absolutely, with the extra expense not looming as any big concern.
And I'm also indebted to Alicia Fletcher, a great fan of silent cinema who organizes a lot of programming in the Toronto area.
Thanks to her, I've had the chance to accompany films in this terrific city. And I'm looking forward to this summer's visits!
And in the "Small World" department, I first met Alicia when she was visiting Boston and attended a screening of the Able Gance film 'J'Accuse' that I was accompanying...at the Harvard Film Archive!
More updates as it happens. But if you're interest in the Lubitsch films, the complete schedule is online at the Harvard Film Archive's Web site.
And here's a round-up of the screenings I'm accompanying during the series, which runs from June through September.
• Sunday, June 18, 2017, 7 p.m.: "Shoe-Palace Pinkus" (1916) and "Meyer from Berlin" (1919), directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, Mass. (617) 496-3211. Admission $9 per person, $7 for non-Harvard students, Harvard faculty and staff, and senior citizens; free for Harvard students. Part of a summer-long retrospective of the work of director Ernst Lubitsch. "Meyer From Berlin": one of a series of popular “Jewish comedies” starring Lubitsch himself as a go-getting schlemiel.
• Monday, June 19, 2017, 7 p.m.: "Madame Dubarry" (1919) directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, Mass. (617) 496-3211. Admission $9 per person, $7 for non-Harvard students, Harvard faculty and staff, and senior citizens; free for Harvard students. Part of a summer-long retrospective of the work of director Ernst Lubitsch. The romance of Emil Jannings’ Louis XV with coquettish commoner Pola Negri leads to the French Revolution in the equally revolutionary epic that launched Lubitsch’s international fame and led to his exodus in Hollywood.
• Monday, June 26, 2017, 7 p.m.: "Kohlhiesel's Daughter" (1920) directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, Mass. (617) 496-3211. Admission $9 per person, $7 for non-Harvard students, Harvard faculty and staff, and senior citizens; free for Harvard students. Part of a summer-long retrospective of the work of director Ernst Lubitsch. Dual-roled Henny Porten and Emil Jannings replay The Taming of the Shrew in the Bavarian Alps.
• Sunday, July 9, 2017, 7 p.m.: "So This Is Paris" (1926) directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, Mass. (617) 496-3211. Admission $9 per person, $7 for non-Harvard students, Harvard faculty and staff, and senior citizens; free for Harvard students. Part of a summer-long retrospective of the work of director Ernst Lubitsch. Hilariously over-the-top Modern Dancers Lilyan Tashman and André Beranger are already looking for extracurricular action when in barges jealous, cane-wielding married doctor Monte Blue and the four-way complications begin, resolved in “an astounding Charleston sequence – a kind of cubist nightmare of what 20s people thought they were really like (John Gillett).”
• Friday, Aug. 4, 2017, 7 p.m.: "Anna Boleyn" (1920) directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, Mass. (617) 496-3211. Admission $9 per person, $7 for non-Harvard students, Harvard faculty and staff, and senior citizens; free for Harvard students. Part of a summer-long retrospective of the work of director Ernst Lubitsch. Emil Jannings’ tour-de-force as Henry VIII highlights the most impressive of Lubitsch’s spectacles, with Henny Porten as the eponymous Anna.
• Monday, Aug. 14, 2017, 7 p.m.: "Die Bergkatze/The Wildcat" or "The Mountain Cat" (1921), directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, Mass. (617) 496-3211. Admission $9 per person, $7 for non-Harvard students, Harvard faculty and staff, and senior citizens; free for Harvard students. Part of a summer-long retrospective of the work of director Ernst Lubitsch. Amidst delightfully bizarre décor—framed by altering screen shapes—a stalwart bandit chaser falls for bandit’s daughter Pola Negri. Lubitsch’s German comedy masterpiece is "both an anti-militarist satire and a wonderful fairy tale" (John Gillett).
And during all this, I'm juggling several composition projects that I've promised people for performance in the near future. So I'm buckling in for a fast summer!
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