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One of the great pleasures we movie buffs get here in Ithaca
is the thrill of seeing silent films with live music accompaniment. Two or
three times a year, Cornell Cinema screens a silent film - either a comedy
classic or something more obscure - with live piano playing along, usually
featuring Philip Carli or David Borden filling in the gap of silence with
sweet music. Over the past few years, we've seen groups like the Alloy
Orchestra or the Tin Hat Trio come to town with loads of musical gear in
tow to "score" films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Having attended an Alloy Orchestra
performance before, I can tell you that it's an invigorating way to watch a
film. It's a thrill to see musicians watching the screen along with the
audience, their instruments splayed out in front of them, ready to deploy
the right sound or noise at the exact time.
We'll get another chance to have that
experience when the Boston-based Devil Music Ensemble comes to Ithaca this
weekend for two separate performances. On Friday, Oct. 22 at Cinemapolis,
they will play their score for the German Expressionist classic The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari, sure to put everyone in just the right spooky mood for
Halloween. Then, on Saturday, Oct. 23, the l'il Devils will be at Willard
Straight Theatre to play along with Big Stakes, a more obscure but no less
enjoyable Western romantic comedy from 1925.
The Devil Music Ensemble consists of
founding guitarist Brandon Wood, drummer Tim Nylander and electric
violinist Jonah Rapino. The band plays assorted electric guitars, lap
steel, vibraphone, electrified violin, percussion, keyboards and vintage
analog synthesizers. Wood says that the Devil Music Ensemble started out as
a rock n' roll band, like so many others. At early gigs, they would
sometimes project old films on the wall behind them as they played their
sets, not playing to the action, but simply adding the projected image as a
"condiment" to the overall experience.
"One day, we decided, let's really
score a film," remembers Wood, "really sit down and pay attention
to the action and the story and the characters. We have so much fun doing
it, and it seems to be really well received. It's been a tradition for a
really long time. People [like the Alloy Orchestra] have been taking a more
modern approach to film scoring [for silent films] as opposed to the way it
was 75 or 100 years ago, a guy playing piano along with the film in a movie
theater.
"I think it's a very exciting
genre," says Wood, "because there's this other element that's
guiding, musically, what we decide to do. Instead of us just writing songs,
we have to pay attention to what's on the screen."
The ensemble incorporates many musical
flavors into its sound, which helped point them in this intriguing
direction. For instance, they have a monthly gig in Boston playing country
music. "Being a fan of those Clint Eastwood Westerns, we thought,
Let's score a Western," recalls Wood. As for finding Big Stakes, Wood
says the band did an online search, found and bought about 15 silent films
and watched them all. Says Wood, "Big Stakes was the one that really
caught our attention."
In that film, J.B. Warner stars as a
Texas gentleman who falls for a Mexican girl and tries to win her from a
dashing rival, the Mexican General, in a contest involving Mexican jumping
beans. A subplot involving the KKK may be a subtle rebuke to D.W Griffith's
Birth of a Nation.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is much
better known, even to non-film buffs. You can see stills detailing its
shadowy darkness and nightmarish, angled dreamscape sets in just about any
good film encyclopedia or resource book. The story of a mad scientist and a
somnambulist, the film unfolds as a tale told - or is it a dream? Along
with Dryer's Vampyr and Murnau's Nosferatu, Cabinet is one of the great
relics of German Expressionist films.
"We want the films that we
accompany to be exciting, and we also want the imagery to be
interesting," says Wood. "We probably could have bought 50 movies
and maybe found three or four that we wanted to put our music to. We're all
film nuts in one way or another, just as we are music fans, and because of
that, it allows us to marry the two."
* * * *
The Devil Music Ensemble performs live music for two silent films: The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on Oct. 22 at 7:15 p.m. at Cinemapolis and Big
Stakes on Oct. 23 at 7:30 p.m. at Cornell's Willard Straight Theatre.
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