Another day, another adventure in the big city. “My!” you
must be thinking by now (if that’s something that you’re likely to consider
thinking about at all…) “What has come over
him, the old hermit…?” but you’d be quite wrong to think that. If we’ve got the
energy and if we’ve bought the tickets far enough in advance, and they’re
expensive enough not to want to waste them, we’re pretty much ready to go to
anything… Just as long as we can be back at a reasonable hour on a “school”
night…
After that, we strolled over for a late afternoon three(ish) course lunch at “Bakerie” before buying a few
bottles of “the finest wines known to man…” from their wine shop, and then strolling back through the city to stash them in the car rather than having to
lug them around with us for the rest of the evening.
Because we had plans…
You did remember that I mentioned “tickets” didn’t you…?
Sorry, but sometimes I feel that I have to check that you’re still with me…
Anyway, off we jolly well toddled to the Royal Northern
College of Music to wait for the start of the event that we were due to attend.
This was a performance of a “New Live Score” to accompany the 1929 silent film
from Germany starring Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box”.
An every day story of “prostitution”, gambling, “murder”,
alcoholism, “lesbianism”, pimping, “white slave trading”, and serial killing
set in Germany and, via a few other places in between, London, all set during
the years between the two biggest European conflicts of the first half of the
twentieth century. Granted, it does portray a foggy old “London” where “Jack
the Ripper” still walks the seedier corners of the city forty years later than
he actually did, and warning posters written in German are regularly plastered
to the brickwork, but that’s international perception and the tourist trade for
you.
That’s not a criticism of the movie, by the way. The rich
and striking visuals and metaphors, and the occasional close up of an
expositional poster, were just some of the astonishing range of techniques used by
the silent film makers to help them to tell their story in a surprisingly
accessible and universally understandable way. Just splice in a few translated
caption cards, and add a few more to explain those close-ups of your native
text, and those movies could travel to pretty much anywhere in the world.
The movie itself was amazing to look at, and the story and
the stunning visuals really sucked me in once it got going, even if the seats
were a little hard going for a movie lasting two and a quarter hours and being
shown without an intermission.
To be perfectly honest I had my doubts when it first began that I would be able to keep awake, and yet that long running time rather flew
by and I was very surprised that the time had genuinely past when the house
lights came up and the musicians took their bows, thinking that the 133 minutes
listed had been a typo of some kind.
The other small matter that I ought to mention is that I was
slightly disappointed by the new musical score, if truth needs to be told. It
was more than effective in the second half when the mood considerably darkened,
but I did wonder, during the quite “frivolous” first reel, whether the composer
had even watched the movie that he was supposed to be scoring.
I can’t claim to be any kind of musician, and certainly have
little experience of writing modern scores for silent film classics, but my
previous experience of accompanied silent movies is that the music is supposed
to help to tell the story and, especially during the “party”, “wedding” and
“theatre” sequences, I had to concentrate very hard to follow the plot because
the music wasn’t counterpointing any of it.
I know that this style of music was perhaps not meant to be doing any of this,
but I genuinely believe that there was a point to those old accompanists back in the day, and that was
to supplement the story with atmosphere and mood, and to give a “theme” as a
“voice” to all of the characters being portrayed on the film. I personally think that, just because a
scene is ultimately “bleak” or “dark” does not mean that a ten-minute monotone
is necessarily the best way to demonstrate that notion, especially if the “sight gags”
are being allowed to fall flat, and the jollier moments are being allowed to pass
almost unnoticed and unremarked upon (in a musical sense).
At various points in the movie, the jokes had no
underscoring, the musicians seen on screen were not referenced, the theatrical
performances staged within a theatre environment were unaccompanied, and, even during a “Christmas” sequence
featuring a brass band, there was not even the slightest hint of a reference to what they
might have been playing.
I’m probably showing my ignorance, and the composer could
probably justify every one of those choices in a very erudite and convincing
manner, and he’d most probably be right, but my understanding of an accompanied
score is that it ought to enhance the action being shown on screen rather than
distracting you from it, but what do I know about anything?
Nevertheless, this was a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend
an evening, and a very effective way of rediscovering a true great of silent
German cinema and, despite those misgivings which, in the end didn’t detract
from my enjoyment all that much, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Well, we had already paid for the tickets… :-)
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