University of Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities MA Heritage Studies: Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image

(RE)SCORING HÄXAN

Supervisor: Annet Dekker

Second Reader: Eef Masson

Thesis of: Fabrizio D’Alessio E-mail: [email protected] Student Number: 11311487 Amsterdam, 4 February 2018

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 3

CHAPTER 1: SILENT FILM WITH MUSIC, A TRADITION OF NOVELTY 6 1.1 A theoretical gap between film and music 7 Looking for the added value 7 Cinema as event 9 1.2 (Re)scoring silent films, a new-old practice 11 Historically-accurate versions 12 Novel versions 13

CHAPTER 2: (RE)SCORING HÄXAN 15 2.1 Häxan, what is it? 15 A tormented reception 16 2.2 The phantom ‘first night’ of the Witch 19 Authentic conjectures 19 Back in time through DVD’s multiplicity 21 Surrounded by sounds in a Home Theatre 22 2.3 How does the Devil talk? 24 Into the gap 24 The voice of the Devil 25 Cult as event 27 2.4 A kiss of life for the Witch 30 Hypermediated performances 31 Songs for synchresis 32 Electronic sounds for contemporary audiences 33

CONCLUSION 34

BIBLIOGRAPHY 37

2 INTRODUCTION

The practice of adding music to a silent film is as long as cinema. Up until the standardization that came with the introduction of sound, music for the silent film was “an independent, ever-changing accompaniment” (Marks 6). From theater to theater, many different musicians worked on the same single silent picture, the form and style of accompaniment would vary from country to country, even theatre to theatre, and evolve and change over time. Orchestras and individual musicians (who improvised or used specially composed film music), traveling lecturers, actors reading dialogues behind the screen made each and every film screening of the same film a unique performative event. Nowadays, live or recorded musical scores added to silent films range from the original and historically reconstructed orchestral or piano music, if this has been preserved, involve commissioning a new musical composition or improvisation, or use a collage of existing compositions. This current culture of dealing with old silent films on the one hand engages an aim for retaining ‘original intentions’ or ‘the author’s wishes’, approaching film as a firmly historical entity, bound by its own time of production. On the other, there is a profoundly different notion that silent film exists to be ‘updated’ and made into a living, breathing contemporary object (Donnelly 13-4). As music as an addition is able to remove or add to the original intentions of the film significantly, this phenomenon has opened up the possibility for silent films being re-contextualized through new music. The main purpose of this thesis is to analyze how these musical reinterpretations of silent films are structured and realized, focusing on their different modes of production and reception, trying to detect the added value that music brings to silent film. My hypothesis is that the added value can be established not only by the music, but also by how it is produced and performed, and by other heterogeneous sonic elements of the (new) score like a voice- over narration or songs. Chapter 1 will outline problems regarding the theoretical analysis of the relationship between film and music and introduce a theoretical framework based on Michel Chion’s concepts of cinema as an audiovisual relationship and Rick Altman’s theorization of cinema as event for examining the practice of adding music to a silent film. In Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen (1994), Michel Chion (French music composer, professor at the Université de Paris, and a prolific writer on film, sound, and music) elaborates a consistent terminology focused on the audiovisual relationship. According to Chion the most important result of the relation between image and sound is the added value, meaning “the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression (…) that this information or expression ‘naturally’ comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself” (5). The added value is an additional aesthetic level that sound can bring to an image and vice versa, and has a transformative effect over film. Chion developed forced marriage, a method for the analysis of the interaction of sound and image that consists in changing the music that accompanies a sequence of images in a film. When the combination of sound and image is altered the interpretation of a scene can change completely by adding a different soundtrack to the same images. I will show that this method can be especially useful to show the relationship between silent film and its (new) scores. With Sound Theory, Sound Practice (1992) Rick Altman (professor of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and author of several studies on the history silent film sound) inaugurated a performative turn in film sound studies, which led to a stronger contextualization and historization of film production conditions and film exhibition

3 circumstances, taking into consideration information that until then were mostly unrecognized in the usual processes of film and that led to view and analyze also the context of its creation, performance, and reception. Altman’s elaboration of cinema as event provides the theoretical framework to analyze the different modes of performance and how it is produced and received. The sound performance that accompanied silent film screenings consisted, and still consists, of many different elements. The interaction between these elements is as important as the elements themselves. A mode of performance in the context of silent film sound therefore means a special constellation of devices, a special approach to certain practical problems, economical as well as aesthetical. In these different modes various ways of addressing the audience, diverse relationships to a single film and a different approach to sound and music can be observed. In the second part of the chapter I will present a broad categorization of the contemporary practices of (re)scoring silent films based on different historiographical approaches: the historically-accurate (that tend to focus on 'authenticity' and fidelity to the historical context of the film's initial release) vs. the novel versions (that try to update the film and to expose it to a newer, younger audience). I will use some of the notions developed by Chion as a starting point for trying to answer to the following question: what is the added value that results from applying a forced marriage between (new) music and a silent film and how does it manifest? Altman’s elaborations are useful to expand these questions so to include in the analysis also the stages of production-performance-reception of cinema as event: what are the elements that must be taken into consideration to analyze the different results of diverse exercises of forced marriage, using music of different genres from different eras, recorded with different techniques and technologies, performed in different exhibition spaces and intended for different audiences? After presenting the history and the characteristics of Häxan, a Swedish-Danish silent film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen in 1922, which I take as a case study, chapter 2 will expose the analysis of three of its different scores. Rather than performing a musical or filmic analysis, I will focus on a silent film with added music considered as event, and on the added value it brings to the film. Within each of the subchapters I will provide information on historical and theoretical features which centrally inform the category of each score, and outline the ways in which they are structured and realized, the technologies involved and the heterogeneous elements of sound that are most effective for the reinterpretation. Subchapter 2.2 will focus on the characteristics of the historically-accurate practice of rescoring silent films and then analyze the reconstruction of the original orchestral accompaniment of Häxan’s Danish premiere, supervised by film music specialist Gillian Anderson and presented in 2001 in the Criterion Collection DVD edition with Dolby Digital 5.0 audio configuration, and how this technology is used to recreate the immersive soundscape of the original performance through three-dimensional sounds in a “home theatre” environment. In Subchapter 2.3, I will analyze the score of Witchcraft Through the Ages (a version of Häxan made by Anthony Balch in 1968) focusing on how a new score far removed from the original context of a silent film can re-contextualize it, updating the film for a new audience, and altering its cultural reputation and status. Balch’s reinterpretation is probably the first known case of adding anachronistic music to a silent film after the silent era and uses not only music but also a voice-over narration by cult writer William Burroughs. Subchapter 2.4 will focus on the performative aspects of live musical accompaniment of silent films and then analyze the live scoring of Häxan with pop electronic music by the

4 Dutch band Kinetophone, seen (and heard) at EYE Filmmuseum in April 2017 during the Imagine Film Festival. This reinterpretation is characterized by the use of songs and electronic music that is particularly effective in attracting a new audience of young people. In the conclusion I will expose the results of my research, my personal considerations about the continual musical reinterpretations of silent films and highlight the need for academic studies to take this mutability into account through the comparative analysis of multiple scores of the same silent film that can provide an informed knowledge of the elements that structure the rescoring practice, which could be used for making it more effective in attracting and interacting with contemporary audiences.

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CHAPTER 1

SILENT FILM WITH MUSIC, A TRADITION OF NOVELTY

6 1.1 A theoretical gap between film and music

Cinema’s special relationship with music had started even before moving images were invented in the early 1890s. The strategies of combining dramatic scenes with music were drawn from prior and contemporaneous media and art forms, especially opera, but also magic lantern. Illustrated songs were, at least in the US, a precursor of cinema, insofar as this format helped define the relationship between narrative visual elements and music. Some early films were barely more than technically updated versions of illustrated songs (Altman, Sound 114). This precise convergence of media practices constituted a large part of the attraction for contemporary audiences. Seen in this light, cinema is much more dependent on music and musical formats than is generally acknowledged. But how is film music integrated with the visual element on the screen? Does the accompaniment by music necessarily mean subordination of music to all other aspects of the film? To what extent does a soundtrack influence and alter the interpretation of a film? To answer to this kind of questions, the analysis of the relationship between film and music has usually taken one of two paths. The first utilizes an analytic methodology, which is appropriated from musicology and privileges the musical over the filmic. This approach is focused on film music as ‘music’, treats score much as any other musical composition, discusses music for films instead of analyzing music in films. It requires specialized competences and an adequate musical education and has little possibility of discovering something about the way that music and film interact. The second approach emphasizes film theory over musicology, again having only a partial and limited vision of the relationship. Due to the lack of a common theoretical language, and because few scholars possess training in either one area or the other, the resulting literature of both these two approaches tends to be heavily biased in one direction or the other and prevents either discipline from discoursing effectively with the other. However, there have been scholars who have aimed to be interdisciplinary rather than relying solely on visual or musicological analysis. According to them, visuals and music should not be considered as two separate and unequal elements that are somehow pasted to each other but as two equal agents that fuse to create the audiovisual experience. This wave of film scholarship aiming to treat film as an audiovisual unit blossomed in the 1990s with early contributors like Michel Chion and Rick Altman, who aimed to overturn the traditional ‘visual bias’ of film scholarship.

Looking for the added value In Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen (originally in French, 1990, translated in English by Claudia Gorbman in 1994, with a foreword by Walter Murch), Michel Chion developed the notion of audiovisual contract, a pact to which the audio-spectator agrees to forget that sound is coming from loudspeakers and picture from the screen. The audio-spectator considers the elements of sound and image to be participating in one the same entity or world. The result of the audiovisual contract is that one perception influences the other and transforms it (Chion, Audio-Vision 216). Chion created a term for what he holds to be one of the most important effects of the relation between image and sound, added value, meaning

the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information or expression ‘naturally’ comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself” (5).

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This added value that is created by the audio and visual components is an extra aesthetic level that sound can bring to an image and vice versa and has a transformative effect over film. The creation of added value is a joint effort of the image and sound. On the one hand, sound changes the image for the spectator into something different were it shown by itself, but on the other hand visualizing a sound makes the spectator hear the sound differently then if it would be played without images (Chion, Audio-Vision 21). When combined, sound and image create a total effect that is greater than the sum of its parts. The effect of the two elements together is more powerful and expressive than either could be standing on its own. In order to analyze the added value of film sound, Chion created two analytical methods: 1. the masking method, which involves the spectator watching a film a number of times, but paying attention to the audio and visual components separately. First the spectator listens to the soundtrack in isolation from the image, allowing focus on just that element, after this, the film is viewed with the sound muted, lastly, the spectator views the two together. According to Chion, approaching image and sound separately from one another allows the spectator to form a clearer opinion of the influence of both components on the experience of a film (187). 2. Forced marriage is another approach for the analysis of sound and image, and it is especially useful for the relationship between silent film and its musical accompaniments. The forced marriage between sound and film is a creative method for analysis where the spectator changes the music that accompanies a sequence of images. As a consequence, the original combination of sound and image is altered and this exposes the arbitrary, but aesthetically valuable, nature that audiovisual elements can have (188). Moreover, the interpretation of a scene can change completely by adding a different soundtrack to the same images. Next to added value, Chion developed the concept of synchresis, a universal, psychophysiological phenomenon, operating as spontaneously as any reflex. It consists of “perceiving as a single integrated phenomenon, manifesting both visual and acoustic components, the concomitance of a given auditory event and a visual event” (Chion, Film 214) on condition, both necessary and sufficient, that these two events occur simultaneously. Because this phenomenon is uncontrollable, it leads instantly to establish a relationship of close interdependence and ascribe to a single common source sounds and images that may be in their essence very different (Chion, Film 215). Due to the principles of added value and synchresis any element of the soundtrack will enhance the meaning and value of the accompanying image. Whether the sound element and the image have the same source, or whether the sound was added subsequently to the shot of the image is irrelevant to the process of synchresis. Chion’s approach to audio/visual analysis creates a deep and rich reading and establishes a consistent vocabulary. Its specific and comprehensive quality does not privilege music and his work analyses the entirety of the audiovisual spectrum including voice, sound effects and ambient sound. However, Chion’s analysis is influenced by semiology and film narratology (both more or less based on structuralism) that applies the text metaphor in the field of film theories. Rather than focusing on the combination of film and music within the filmic text, I will analyze what happens when this combination is performed in a three-dimensional world. I will use the terminology and some of the notions developed by Chion as a starting point for trying to answer to the following questions: what is the added value that a (new) score brings to silent films and how does it manifest? What is the result of applying a forced marriage between different genres of music and the same silent film?

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Cinema as event Considering film as an experience and cinema as an event, Rick Altman’s Sound Theory, Sound Practice (1992) frames a broader perspective on sound that approaches film in the context of its material existence in a three-dimensional world, paying equal attention to the film and to its contexts of production and reception. Altman started a performative turn in film sound studies that led to a stronger contextualisation and historization of film production conditions and film exhibition circumstances. In the introduction of the book Altman notes that most of the literature “treat cinema as a series of self-contained texts, divorced from material existence and the three-dimensional world” (2) and centered and structured around the image and calls for works on sound that diverge from the familiar textual strategies inherited from literary semiotics and classical music analysis. Altman, finds it helpful “to conceive of cinema as event. Viewed as a macro- event, cinema is still seen as centered on the individual film, but according to a new type of geometry” (3) that integrates the worlds of production and reception, and takes into account all the components of the filmic experience. By proposing cinema as event, Altman not only makes room for sound theory, emphasizing the heterogeneous and material aspects of film sounds, but includes also production and reception circumstances, of which sound is an important aspect. Cinema is then seen as a live embodied experience and watching a movie implies being in a concrete space (the theater, our homes, a film museum, etc.), facing diverse kind of reproduction technologies, of musical and sound effect instrumentation, in a specific projection (or broadcast) in a particular circumstance. In his model Altman identifies twelve attributes of cinema that had been hidden because of the textual approach to cinema: multiplicity, three-dimensionality, materiality, heterogeneity, intersection, performance, multi-discursivity, instability, mediation, choice, diffusion, and interchange (4 – 14). According to Altman, traditional approaches to cinema have ignored the lengthy process of conception – investment – production – distribution – exhibition - reception. “Until completion, the film is characterized by the multiplicity of its conceptors; after distribution, the film is characterized by the multiplicity of its receptors” (4). Recognizing the heterogeneous nature of the cinema experience not only opens the field to consideration of a broad range of objects, processes, and activities but has an especially direct impact on the study of sound, revealing the heterogeneous chain of objects and spaces which serve as its vehicle. Altman proposes cinema events as the intersection of many separate lines of work, throughout the production, reception, and cultural spheres. He also emphasizes the variety of motivational trajectories that bring diverse audience members to the theater and the variety of discourses, framed by diverse groups and addressed to populations varying from single individuals to the entire culture: a film does not carry a single message, unified, unilinear, and univocal, but reveals its multi-discursivity. From the complexity of its financing and production to the diversity of its exhibition, cinema must be considered in terms of the material resources that it engages, for example revealing that, although conventional speaker placement attempts to identify sound sources with the two-dimensional area of the screen, sound occurs only in the three-dimensional volume of the theater at large. According to Altman, critics neglected important aspects of earlier film exhibition, which demonstrate that for most of its history it was a performance-oriented medium and that “film is always the product of performance” (9). From its earliest years, cinema has been constitutionally interrelated at every level with other media and forms of entertainment, thus “the values and standards associated with cinema cannot be described

9 independently of the models through which they are mediated” (11). Just as the mediation factor expands the notion of the cinema event, so does the phenomenon of choice, whether operative on the production side or the reception side. Altman highlights how ‘the film’ is fundamentally unstable in nature and how it is impossible to see and hear it as it was ‘originally seen and heard’, since there never was a single original. The construction of cinema as event reveals the continuous interchange between production and reception of the filmic text and the culture(s) at large. The diffusion of films throughout the culture in the form of various operational strategies leads in a number of largely unexpected directions. Although some of these twelve attributes are maybe too unclear and repetitive (some of them refer to the same aspect from different points of view), Altman’s elaboration of cinema as event provides a theoretical framework to analyze silent film with added music as event. If Chion’s added value stems from applying a forced marriage between images and sound, Altman’s model allows to expand the field of research so to include in the analysis also the stages of production-performance-reception of this event. What are the elements that contribute to establishing an added value in the musical reinterpretation of a silent film? What are the effects of diverse exercises of forced marriage, (using music of different genres and eras, recorded with different techniques and technologies, performed in different exhibition spaces and intended for different audiences) on the cultural status of the same silent film?

10 1.2 (Re)scoring silent film, a new-old practice

The practice of adding music to a silent film is as long as cinema. During the silent era music for film was “an independent, ever-changing accompaniment” (Marks 6). From theater to theater, many different musicians worked on the same single silent picture, the form and style of accompaniment would vary from country to country, even theatre to theatre, and evolve and change over time. Sound was added often in the form of music played live by musicians as the film was being shown, and this ranged from a single piano to an orchestra, that could dramatically vary in size (Altman, Silent 289). As a result, each film could have many different ‘scores’. “The existence of multiple interpretations created a tradition based on the continuous renovation of film music: a tradition of novelty” (Bellano 208). This spontaneity was immediately lost once synchronized soundtracks were permanently fixed onto film stock in the 1930s. It did not take long for many of the practices and materials of the period to be forgotten or lost, but there have been efforts ever since to keep them alive. Cinematheques and other venues where silent films continued to be screened went on providing piano accompaniments and, in occasion of re-releases for anniversaries, also orchestral accompaniment. In New York, between 1939 and 1967, composer and pianist Arthur Kleiner, musical director for the Museum of Modern Arts Film Department, maintained the tradition of using original accompaniments, availing himself of the Museum's collection of rare scores; where scores were lacking, he and his colleagues created scores of their own, which were reproduced in multiple copies and rented out with the films. In the Soviet Union, a new score to Potemkin was composed by Nikolai Kryukov in 1950, and in 1967 a score compiled (by others) from pre-existing orchestral works by Shostakovich accompanied a re- release of October on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution. Similarly, a new score for Potemkin was fashioned from parts of Shostakovich’s symphonies when the film was restored to mark its fiftieth anniversary in 1975 (Cooke 39). This initially specialist activity has spilled over into the commercial arena. In the early 1980s two competing revivals of Abel Gance’s Napoleon vied for public attention in a number of major cities—one, based on the restoration of the film by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, with a score composed and conducted by Carl Davis, and the other with a score compiled and conducted by Carmine Coppola (Cooke 40). Since then, even wider diffusion has been given to silent film music with the issue of silent films on videocassettes, laser discs, DVDs and Blu- ray discs. Today silent film classics and lesser-known works screened at theaters, film museums and festivals worldwide appeal to broad audiences with original, compiled, adapted, reconstructed, remixed or completely new musical accompaniment and reinvent the interpretations of silent film sound in novel ways. Moreover, the production and distribution of DVDs that contain multiple soundtracks that users can choose according to their personal tastes has opened up the possibility for silent films to be re-contextualized through music and related technologies, indeed made into a different object through being associated with strident and original musicians. The tradition of novelty is still alive and is still unsettled, with no consensus as to what the music should be like or how it should be presented, and with a much broader range of possibilities compared to the silent era. In Today’s Sounds for Yesterday’s Films (2016) Donnelly tries to categorize this range of possibilities considering a polar approach between Historically-accurate versions vs. Novel versions. On the one hand, there is the aim to capture 'original intentions' or 'the author's wishes', approaching film as a

11 historical entity, bound by and emanating from its 'own time', and on the other a notion that silent film exists 'to be updated' (perhaps to be 'improved').

Historically-accurate versions The historically-accurate rescoring of silent films retains a traditional character to the score, often guided by knowledge of an 'original version' and tends to focus on the historical context of the film's initial release (Donnelly 13). Within this category, Donnelly makes a further division according to the historiographical approach followed for the rescorings, that can follow a scholarly history or an empathetic history approach. The scores resulting from the scholarly history approach follow historical research, with the music as an outcome of archival work (22). These reconstructions are often presented at dedicated silent film festivals attended by academics, scholars or simple aficionados and might be seen as a film-musical manifestation of museum culture. Scholar-conductors like Gillian B. Anderson have reconstructed scores from historical sources, using primary information and often exploiting the musical compendiums of the period to furnish scores as close to what might have been as possible. In historiographical terms, this approach is closely related to the processes of traditional academic history, and “films screened along these lines usually have a strong sense of 'historical veracity' and scholarly responsibility (as curators of culture)” (Donnelly 22). Elsaesser noted “’the phantom ‘first night’ of archivists and historians” (58) and this notion seems the most important guide for this approach. Listening to the reconstructed original score, whether it special or compiled from pre- existing music, not only makes it possible to enjoy silent film as experience, but also get some impression as to how musicians intended particular sequences to come together with music. The music helps to construct the films and their imagery as historical texts and therefore to promise access to cultural meanings from the time of the first such performances. For this reason, resynchronizations of silent films with ‘original music’ are seductive as they seem to promise a historically accurate glimpse of another audio-visual era. Although reconstructions of original scores can be revelatory, they can also be misleading. While they represent a small corner of the wider culture of silent film accompaniment, they are unrepresentative of the silent era as a whole. Sometimes using the original cue sheets can turn the screening of a silent film into more of a museum experience than a cinematic one, emphasizing the aspect of the film that has dated. In many cases the original scores are either not very interesting or the pieces being used have become so clichéd that the effect on a present-day audience would be far different from what was originally intended. Over time radio and television has made some pieces of music so familiar and given them certain associations that they didn‘t have before, and it would be fatal to use them as accompaniment for silent films. Coming from a similar point of view, the empathetic history approach is essentially interested in how it must have felt for audiences at the time of the film's release. While historical veracity is often important, it is not as important as the emotional tone of the music and some anachronisms may be acceptable in the service of the film (Donnelly 22). Many current pianists, such as Ben Model, Neil Brand, and Stephen Horne provide emotionally engaging music that broadly sounds as if it might have been played at the time focusing more on audience emotion than on historical authenticity. This mild compromise of historical veracity is acceptable for the cause of current accessibility. (Donnelly 22)

12 Novel versions The novel versions tend to use a rhetoric of cultural renewal or ‘updating’ in their aspiration to make the silent film a valued object to a new context of consumption and to a wider contemporary audience (Donnelly 13). It is no accident that the increase in live music for films has developed hand in hand with the increase in film festivals that host such showings. This removes old films from the archive and repositions them as ‘viable’ films for contemporary audiences. Also within this category Donnelly makes a further division according to the historiographical approach followed for the rescoring, that may follow a populist history or a issue-based history approach. The populist history approach attempts to reformat and make accessible knowledge about the past to an audience who are assumed to need it structured in a 'modernized' and 'popular' manner (Donnelly 23). Setting silent films to scores consisting of electronic, rock and avant-garde music styles is the strongest point of contention within the silent film community. Many silent film enthusiasts, especially those of the older generations, consider this to be nothing less than sacrilege, but nevertheless, these soundtracks are increasing in popularity. Whether or not the particular music fits the particular film is a different issue altogether. The major risk concerning these reinterpretations is that there is a tendency for new scores to be commissioned from famous musicians in order to attract their audience to the screening and that sometimes musicians impose themselves upon the film with too much expressivity that risks to be intrusive and irritating for appreciating the film. Thomas Elsaesser bravely defended the disparaged Giorgio Moroder version of Metropolis (1926), an early example of novel and populist approach to scoring silent film released in the early 1980s with a soundtrack of electronic dance music and songs by Adam Ant, Bonnie Tyler and Freddie Mercury amongst other, in opposition to the obsessive focus on the earlier mentioned “the phantom ‘first night’ of archivists and historians” (58), typical of the historically accurate approach. Elsaesser notes that Moroder’s modern music allowed the audience to appreciate Fritz Lang’s film as again being imbued with a sharp feeling of modernity, which it would have had upon its initial release in the late 1920s. Issue-based history takes historical objects and narrative and imbues them with contemporary concerns. This approach replaces any sense of a proper history with one of partisan approach and acceptance of myriad points of view on the past (Donnelly 23). Electronic artist and musician DJ Spooky produced probably the most extreme example of a silent classic film reworked with the issue-based history approach. He made performances and released a DVD of Rebirth of a Nation (2005), a ‘remix’ of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), which although currently acclaimed as a founding moment in modern cinematic art, has a clear racist agenda. DJ Spooky not only adds a musical soundtrack but also a voice-over commentary on the film’s action, perhaps most notably during its sequences lauding the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the remix goes further than this, removing and repeating sections of the film and using superimposed graphics on the screen, all in aid of a critical discourse that becomes incorporated within the film. In these radical re-contextualizations, the film ceases to be the central focus, and the staging is definitely less respectful of the films, which lose completely their integrity and centrality in the event. There are a handful of films that seem to attract a large amount of interest from musicians supplying new music for silent films, probably because of their strongly stylized visual content, particularly German Expressionist horror films or other 'popular' silent classics. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922), for example, are constant sources exploited by musicians. Similarly popular are Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Metropolis

13 (1927), and Häxan (The Witch), a Swedish-Danish silent film written and directed Benjamin Christensen in 1922, which over the years had many musical soundtracks created by many different artists. The aim of next chapter is to present the history and characteristics of Häxan. I will then apply the notions developed by Chion and Rick Altman’s theoretical model of cinema as event to discuss the main peculiarities of three different musical reinterpretations of Häxan. Within each of the subchapters I will provide information on historical and theoretical features which centrally inform the category of each score, according to Donnelly’s classification of historically accurate and novel versions, and focus on the ways in which they are structured and realized, the technologies involved in the stages of production-performance-reception and the heterogeneous elements of sound that are most effective for the reinterpretation.

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CHAPTER 2

(RE)SCORING HÄXAN

15 2.1 Häxan, what is it?

One of the most unconventional films of the silent era, Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (English title: The Witches or Witchcraft Through the Ages) is a 1922 Swedish-Danish silent film about how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts. Christensen spent about two years researching and shooting Häxan, at great expense, but the quality of production is evident throughout the film. Based partly on Christensen’s study of the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century German guide for inquisitors, Häxan is presented as a faux documentary, but it can justifiably be called many things. “It can be considered the first cult movie, a genuine 'film maudit' (literally a 'cursed film'), the first true feature-length documentary (along with Nanook of the North, which was made the same year)” (Stevenson 1) and contains dramatized sequences that are comparable to horror films. I choose this silent film as a case study because during the years it has attracted a large amount of interest from musicians supplying new music for silent films thus allowing me to have a good number of musical reinterpretations to choose from for a comparative analysis. Presented in seven parts, Häxan opens with "Sources," an illustrated lecture alternating intertitles with drawings and paintings to illustrate the behavior of pagan cultures in the Middle Ages regarding their vision of demons and witches. In addition, several large-scale models are employed to demonstrate medieval concepts of the structure of the solar system and the commonly accepted depiction of Hell. Part 2, "1488," is a series of vignettes theatrically demonstrating medieval superstition and beliefs concerning witchcraft, including Satan (played by Christensen himself) tempting a sleeping woman away from her husband's bed and terrorizing a group of monks. Also shown is a woman purchasing a love potion from a supposed witch, and a sequence showing a supposed witch dreaming of flying through the air and attending a witches' gathering. Part 3, "The Trials," and Part 4, "The Torture," have a disturbing intensity due to Christensen's depiction of how a villager's family is systemically destroyed by false accusations of witchcraft. Set in the Middle Ages, they concern an old woman accused of witchcraft by a dying man's family. The narrative is used to demonstrate the treatment of suspected witches by the religious authorities of the time. While many of the persecuted were elderly women whose greatest misfortune was being infirm, mentally ill or physically repulsive, the young were no less suspect and just as likely to be tortured or burned at the stake as showed in Part 5, "Sinful Thoughts." One also shudders at the insidious devices on display and put into action in the name of drawing confessions from so-called witches in the section entitled "Techniques." In the final part Christensen seeks to make the claim that most of the women who were accused of witchcraft were possibly mentally ill, and in modern times, such behavior is interpreted as a disease. His case revolves around vignettes about a somnambulist and a kleptomaniac, the implication being that these behaviors would have been thought of as demonically- influenced in medieval times whereas modern times recognizes them as psychological ailments. With Christensen's meticulous recreation of medieval scenes and the lengthy production period, the film was the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made, costing nearly two million Swedish kronor (Stevenson 26).

A tormented reception Featuring powerful images taken from vintage artwork of magic and occult practices through history, Häxan shocked audiences with its depiction of demons and Satanic practices.

16 Although it won acclaim in Denmark and Sweden, the film was banned in the United States and heavily censored in other countries for what were considered at that time graphic depictions of torture, nudity, and sexual perversion. In France for example, eight thousand Catholic women protested in the streets when it finally opened in that country in 1926, demonstrating against it outside the Paris theatre where the film premiered. In a complaint to the police they claimed that it was immoral and a mockery of the Church. Parisian surrealists liked it better and it became one of their favorite film (Stevenson 64). In English- speaking countries no one dared to show the film for many years. Christensen intended Häxan as the first part of a trilogy of films, followed by The Saint and The Spirits, but these projects were never realized. This was partly because of the astronomical cost of Häxan, and also because of Christensen's departure from Europe for Hollywood, where he will direct films for American studios such as MGM or First National (later Warner Bros.) where such didactic, eclectic films were unthinkable. In 1940 Häxan was reissued with an advance screening on 21 November, for a select group of cultural VIPs. On March 3, 1941, the film began its revival run at the Dagmar Theatre, with all proceeds going to benefit the Danish actor's guild. A new print had been struck for the occasion, and the intertitles were also changed (Stevenson 97). For this re-release of Häxan, Christensen filmed an eight-minute “Director's Introduction”. Addressing his audience, Christensen notes that even in our era of sound technology adding a vocal track to Häxan would diminish its effect. He was asked if he could imagine Häxan remade as a sound film:

That would naturally be impossible - how does the Devil talk, for example? Silent films had many drawbacks but also advantages. Sound film is objective; everything is explained through dialogue and they need not engage one's sense of fantasy. Sound film completely lacks the illusion and poetry of silent cinema; one cannot dream and fantasize further about the adventure and the characters contained in the film (Christensen, quoted in Stevenson 106).

However, through the years the film has screened in many different contexts: rock stars have appropriated scenes for their videos while avant-garde musicians and even performance artists have used the film as a backdrop for their own creative expressions. In 1995, for example, a touring "Loud Music Silent Film Festival" screened it as part of a performance by Judith Ren-Lay in collaboration with sculptor and multi-instrumentalist, Ken Butler. The French experimental music group Art Zoyd also created a soundtrack that was released on CD in 1997. This work was commissioned by the City of Copenhagen, the European Union designated Cultural Capital of Europe 1996. Häxan received a luxurious DVD release from the Criterion Collection in 2001. This DVD presented the Swedish Film Institute's restoration of the film with the reconstruction of the original orchestral accompaniment of the Danish premiere, supervised by film music specialist Gillian Anderson and performed by the Czech Film Orchestra, presented with Dolby Digital 5.0 audio configuration. This edition also presented the 1969 version of the film, renamed Witchcraft Through the Ages with a voiceover by William Burroughs and a jazzy musical score by Daniel Humair. In 2007, two new soundtracks for the film were composed in Britain. One by the British composer and performer Geoff Smith, to be performed on the hammered dulcimer, and one by the British electronic/industrial group Bronnt Industries Kapital. A DVD of the film featuring both soundtracks was released by Tartan Films in September 2007. The American film scoring ensemble The Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra premiered its new score for the film at the 2010 St. Louis International Film Festival. In 2011 Potemkine/Agnes b. released a DVD edition of the film that included Barði Jóhannsson’s symphony over the silent film with the

17 Bulgarian Chamber Orchestra that was also released on CD in 2006, and a score by Matti Bye composed in 2007. A new soundtrack from the Dublin Film Ensemble was commissioned by the Horrorthon Festival in 2014 for a presentation in the Irish Film Institute (Stevenson 117). Many other screenings of the film have occurred in various circumstances and contexts all over the world and down through the years, far too many to mention here. Häxan is, in many ways,

the cinematic epitome of Freud's uncanny: we recognise elements of it as belonging to known and familiar categories, yet its overall formulation is bizarre and frustrating. To call it a horror film, a documentary, a horror-documentary or even a midnight movie is an easy way out, blithely falling back on the use of dominant genre categories to encapsulate a film that is all and none (Kendrick).

More than eighty years after its initial release, and more than thirty years since its reconstituted re-release, Häxan continues to confound, surprise and shock because it resists all boundaries, instead forcing viewers to develop new modes of spectatorship that take them outside the ordinary and remind them of the dynamic, always evolving nature of the cinema, then and now. “It is a film destined to be continually revived and rediscovered. Rather than just being 25 years ahead of its time it seems to be eternal” (Stevenson 118). The infinite possibilities that musical accompaniment can bring to a silent film ensure that Häxan always has the potential to be given a new life and a new audience, not just through the reconstruction of the original context of the film but also through new and experimental interpretations which can bring an added value to it.

18 2.2 The phantom ‘first night’ of the Witch

The trend towards a complex and sensitive approach to film accompaniment was a gradual, evolutionary process. Usually the first projected films were accompanied by a piano player who improvised mixing popular songs and the classics. Eventually, films were distributed with published cue sheets suggesting what the piano player (or possibly an organist) would ideally perform. By the 1920s a major film released in a large city might be accompanied by a full orchestra, but since orchestras cannot improvise, complete scores became a necessity. Yet again, these were most often a mixture of current hit tunes and classical favourites. The original score remained an exception. They were initially for “special films” (opera films, historical dramas, films on literary topics), a small corner of the film market designed to appeal to a middle-to-highbrow audience. Even those rare films that did have original scoring were only presented as such in special venues and on certain occasions (especially for first-run screenings), but for general distribution thereafter they received the standard compilation treatment (Altman, Silent 251–8). “The dominant mode of musical accompaniment in the silent era was the compilation, which cobbled together arrangements of popular and classical pieces according to the requirements of each scene “(Chion, Film 8). Orchestras usually played their musical accompaniment in a pit positioned underneath the screen. For Chion music coming from this space becomes the symbol of all traditional musical accompaniment to a film residing outside the film’s world. He defines pit music as the one “that accompanies the image from a nondiegetic position, outside the space and time of the action” (Chion, Audio-Vision 80), as opposed to screen music whose source is in the present time and place of the film’s action (diegetic). In the silent era pit music was part of a performative event, as “the presence of flesh-and-blood musicians in the theatre gave every screening, even those with modest means, the allure of a true performance” (Chion, Film 9). This allure of performance must have been definitely stronger at the premiere of important silent films, which were held in theatres with the accompaniment of a big orchestra. Häxan premiered simultaneously in four Swedish cities—Stockholm, Helsingborg, Malmö and Gothenburg—on 18 September 1922 and in Copenhagen on 7 November 1922. The musical program from the original premiere in Sweden, compiled from pre-existing compositions by Rudolf Sahlberg, has been lost. However, in the Criterion Collection DVD release of the film, musician, music historian and silent film music specialist Gillian Anderson recreates Häxan’s musical program from the Danish premiere based on “a list of musical cues printed in the theatre’s weekly program notes" (Anderson). Highlighting some of Altman’s attributes of cinema as event, the reconstruction of the original score of Häxan reveals the multiplicity of a material audiovisual object, the DVD, resulting from the remediation of a live performance. Dolby surround technology tries to recreate the immersive soundscape of the original performance through three-dimensional sounds in a ‘home theatre’ environment. The added value is related to historical authenticity, as producers of the DVD are trying to recreate a reaction in the audience as similar as possible to that of original ones. This reinterpretation is addressed to a small corner of the film market and designed to appeal to a middle-to-highbrow audience, who can afford to buy a Dolby Sound System in order to get the best audio immersive experience.

Authentic conjectures The musical accompaniment to the Copenhagen premiere of Häxan was a compilation of well known orchestral pieces by a wealth of composers and included segments from Schubert's

19 Unfinished Symphony and Rosamunde Overture, Wagner's Tannhauser, Mozart's Titus Overture, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and Ave Maria, Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei (Walker 47). It is believed that it followed the same musical accompaniment of the premiere in Stockholm. In an interview published shortly after the Swedish premiere, director Benjamin Christensen spoke enthusiastically about this compilation:

I would like to take the opportunity to offer my warmest praise for the musical arrangement done for the picture by the conductor Rudolf Sahlberg. It is simply ideal. At first, I myself wanted to have the film run without music, but Mr. Sahlberg has made the music follow the images in a masterly fashion. It is quite simply the best musical arrangement I have ever heard for a film! (Filmjournalen, 8 Oct. 1922 quoted in Anderson).

As Anderson notes, since Christensen liked Sahlberg’s musical arrangements so much, it seems likely that he may have kept the same musical pieces for the Copenhagen premiere as well. Still, it can only be conjectured that the accompaniment for Häxan was the same in Stockholm and Copenhagen: “’Conjecture’, in fact, is the key word for almost everything about the musical reconstruction used here” (Anderson), as she cannot definitively say how much of each piece was used, when these pieces were used in the film, and which arrangements of each musical piece were used. Anderson’s musical team assumes that the order of the music was as published in the program, and when they set the music to the picture, they found that “this assumption could be made to work” (Anderson). In Copenhagen, Häxan was accompanied by a 50-piece orchestra. For the reconstruction of the score Anderson used an 11-piece ensemble from the Czech Film Orchestra in Prague recorded in June 2001 “simply because it was more economical. However, such smaller-scale ensembles would have played these arrangements in many theaters, so it can be justified historically.” (Anderson). Thus the work of Anderson is made in the name of authenticity: “it sounds like it came from the same period as the images. Together they pull you back in time. They sound authentic together. The original chemistry and balance of the picture are restored (however hypothetically)” (Anderson). In his 1995 article “Musicology and the presentation of silent film”, silent film musician Philip Carli admits that absolute historical authenticity can never truly be achieved. “The scholarly tools developed through the authenticity movement are invaluable in producing convincing, empathetic scores, but the 'authentic presentation' recedes like a rainbow the further it is pursued” (Carli 307-8). Compositions and performance media are now being evaluated on a more contextual footing. This is not to say that the musicians can ever fully capture the appeal or artistic excitement of musical works that were the emotional and artistic property of a recognizable but still distant society, but they can “at least fit them into a larger picture that may allow us to understand the content better” (Carli 302). According to Carli the central dictum for film accompaniment is that the score and performance should serve the film above all, regardless of the particular genre of the music, which should never overpower the film. As long as it serves the film and of course it is always the situation that some people think it does and some people think it does not. Using the original music, especially as an academic exercise, gives to the film a kind of historical authenticity, because presenters try to recreate a reaction in the audience as similar as possible to that of original audiences, or at least an equivalent experience from a present-day perspective. However, I would argue that it may not necessarily be the best option for presenting a film to a new audience. In many cases the original music does not give the film new life because

20 many of those accompaniments are not understood and not appreciated anymore by contemporary audiences, or they can distract the audience because during the years they have become too familiar. This problem was already known in the silent era. As Altman notes, in the early teens, critics sought to banish from the theatre any music that might compete with the film. In particular, “they recognized that accompaniment by title or lyrics shunted the audience’s attention from the film to the accompanist. Later critics witnessed the same process with overly familiar classical selections” (Altman, Silent 318). When spectators recognize the music from an opera, these critics claimed, their knowledge of that opera interfered with their concentration on the film at hand. Whether the original musical accompaniment is still effective for the contemporary audience’s experience of the silent film or not, it is however an important historical information that should follow the film when it is remediated to digital carriers like DVD, laser disc or Blu-Ray, that offer the possibility of choosing from multiple soundtracks of the same film.

Back in time through DVD’s multiplicity When silent cinema is mechanically synchronized with music and made available commercially as DVDs, this poses challenges for its reproduction within the aesthetics of digital media. Silent films and their (once) live accompaniments are experienced through new technologies: films are stored as digital files, able to be viewed and controlled by the user at home, and are accompanied by pre-recorded soundtracks. “The transformation of a silent film to DVD is not a pouring of old wine into new bottles, but a transformation of the old film to accommodate a new medium with new audience expectations” (Shepard 23.). This transformation of the old film concerns first and foremost the reconstruction of the technical aspects of the film (a steady projection speed, cleaning up of scratches etc.) and result in a digital enhancement of the film. Thus the transformation Shepard proposes is more than a reconstruction, as the true goal of a DVD edition of a silent film is “to transpose the original visual experience for modern eyes rather than to exactly replicate the original material or call attention to the technical processes of restoration” (24). As for the aural experience, one highly notable phenomenon of recent years is how single silent films are made available on DVD with different musical accompaniment among which the spectator can choose. With multiple possibilities at their disposal, viewers can have different experiences of the same film actively choosing which soundtrack to use, revealing the multiplicity of Altman’s cinema as event: “Until completion, the film is characterized by the multiplicity of its conceptors; after distribution, the film is characterized by the multiplicity of its receptors” (Sound 4). According to Chion’s analysis of the audio-visual relationship, music brings multiplicity in itself. All music in a film, especially pit music, can function like the spatiotemporal equivalent of a railroad switch, a “spatiotemporal turntable” (Chion, Audio-Vision 81). Music enjoys the status of being a little freer of barriers of time and space than the other sound and visual elements. The latter are obliged to remain clearly defined in their relation to the diegetic space and to a linear and chronological notion of time. “Music is the turntable of space and time, the place of places that transcends all material barriers” (Chion, Film 410), and offers the possibility of travelling back in time, partially retrieving the film-going experience of the silent era. DVDs reveal also another aspect of cinema as event, materiality: “As a material product, cinema quickly reveals the location and nature of its sound track(s), the technology used to produce them, the apparatus necessary for reproduction, and the physical relationship

21 between loudspeakers, spectators, and their physical surroundings” (Altman, Sound 6). Also Barbara Klinger reads the forms of film technology like DVD and laser disc as shifting the relationship with the spectator from one of abstraction to materiality, because the spectator also becomes owner of the filmic object: ‘This previously physically remote, transitory and public medium has thus attained the solidity and semi-permanent status of a household object, intimately and infinitely subject to manipulation in the private sphere” (57-8). While this account emphasizes the manipulative quality of home technology as a way of personalizing film, there is also a sense of film as a domestic object. The film collection becomes an object of taste reflecting the personality and attributes of the owner; film within the space of lifestyle. Furthermore, Klinger argues that to a large extent, the fan culture of DVD collectors is a fan culture focused on the technical aspects of the medium. The criteria according to which DVD collectors evaluate new editions in Internet chat groups and magazines does not concern the films themselves as artistic products. Rather, they focus on features such as the quantity and quality of bonus material, and the video and audio configuration (76-7). The goal of most silent film restoration is distribution on home media formats. To do so, all silent films are transformed into sound texts. DVD and Blu-ray provide one or more audio tracks which are pre-synchronized with the video track. The viewer may be able to choose from different audio options (alternate scores, commentary, silence), but the fact remains that there is no live element to the digital content. Thus, while digitization offers unprecedented levels of access to the content of film history, it also poses significant challenges to the way in which modern audiences experience silent cinema. A special audio configuration comes in help when trying to recreate immersiveness, one of the characteristics of a live event.

Surrounded by sounds in a Home Theatre Since the emergence of sound in movie theaters, audio configurations have not stopped evolving. Musicians in the pit were replaced by early speakers, and from the original mono feed, the cinema industry moved toward a stereo configuration to heighten the sensation of movement within the auditorium. However, as Altman notes, film theatres concentrate attention on the two-dimensional screen, with the bodies in a fixed position in front of it. In this context, sound is poorly served, for sound cannot exist in a two-dimensional context. “Though conventional speaker placement attempts to identify sound sources with the two- dimensional area of the screen, sound occurs only in the three-dimensional volume of the theatre at large” (Altman, Sound 5). A big change in this respect was brought by Dolby audio configuration. Dolby noise reduction and stereo sound system was introduced into the cinema in 1975 and quickly became associated with the Hollywood blockbusters of the mid to late 1970s, like Star Wars (1977) and Superman (1978). Recognizing the potential for decoding multichannel sound at home, in 1982 Dolby introduced Dolby Surround, a consumer version of the Dolby film sound project, which encoded the two tracks of any stereo program source with four-channel surround sound, in much the same way as movie soundtracks. Dolby Surround was developed with a clear objective, specifically to enhance the audio-visual experience, and it quickly gained marketplace acceptance. As home viewers (and listeners) began to set up more surround systems, the consumer electronics industry realized that a new category of home playback system was being forged. ‘Home theatre’, as it was called, soon became the fastest-growing consumer electronics segment, bringing new life to a

22 stagnating industry. As Chion points out, Dolby “allows for the creation of a true sensorial environment” (Film 130), and this feature allows sound film “to reconnect with the late silent era” (Film 131). In the Criterion Collection DVD edition of Häxan, Anderson’s reconstruction of the original orchestral accompaniment is the only soundtrack presented with Dolby Digital 5.0 audio configuration, and this deliberate production choice aims at reproducing the immersive environment of the original premiere considered as performance. This strongly relates to Altman’s notion of mediation. From its earliest years, cinema has been constitutionally interrelated at every level with other media and forms of entertainment, and “the values and standards associated with cinema cannot be described independently of the models through which they are mediated” (Altman, Sound 11). Because the cinema event includes the spectator and, by extension, the spectator’s experience of other media, one measure of a film's success derives from spectator evaluations based on a set of pre-established notions about what constitutes reality, acceptable ending points, moral behaviour, entertainment, and so forth. “The equation of technology with experience in the home theater aesthetic (“You need hardware to enjoy these experiences to the fullness of their potential”) sells mediated sensations as the sensations to have. Mediation thus becomes the ultimate arbiter of experience” (Klinger 42). Home theater makes media boundary crossings strikingly visible. Its synthesis of multiple technologies forces reconsideration of traditional estimations of medium specificity and also of historical authenticity because, as Altman put it, “only by recognizing the tendency of representational technologies to take on multiple identities, constantly redefined, can we understand the complexities of the historical object” (Sound 123). The enhanced use of the two surround channels, placed at the sides and rear, allows the narrative space to leap off the screen and extends to the whole of the cinema and of ‘home theaters’ auditorium. The spectator is now immersed inside the space rather than outside watching it on the screen, in the same way that happened in the silent era. The added value of this musical reconstruction is related to historical authenticity because it tries to recreate a reaction in the audience as similar as possible to that of original audiences of Häxan, but this is made possible only with the aid of digital means and the historical context is understood only through new representational technologies.

23 2.3 How does the Devil talk?

As Davis very timidly mentions in a footnote of his essay, Witchcraft Through the Ages is probably the first known attempt of adding anachronistic music to a silent film: “the 1968 version of Häxan is perhaps the 'grand-daddy" of utilizing contemporary music for silent film exhibition” (Davis, footnotes 97). The man responsible for this first musical reinterpretation of Häxan was experimental filmmaker Antony Balch (1937-1980), who turned a childhood love for horror movies into a career as an exhibitor, distributor and occasional filmmaker. While living in Paris in the early 1960s, Balch befriended William S. Burroughs and his circle while the author was living at the Beat Hotel. In 1963, they collaborated on the 10 min. experimental film, Towers Open Fire. The two went on to make the even more radical film The Cut- Ups (1966), and the 70mm Bill and Tony (1972). Also in 1963, Balch started his distribution career by securing the British rights to Tod Browning’s infamous film, Freaks (1931), and then successfully petitioning for an end to Britain’s 30 years ban on it. Balch went on to manage two art house theatres in London, while also distributing sex, horror, and art films, including Russ Meyer’s Supervixens and Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of my Demon Brother. Balch supervised the creation of a version of Häxan in which most of the intertitles were removed and replaced with narration (drawn mostly from Christensen's original texts) spoken by William S. Burroughs in his inimitable vocal fashion. Balch also added a jazz score recorded in Paris by drummer and jazz composer Daniel Humair (who worked with artists such as Gerry Mulligan, Don Cherry and Dexter Gordon), played by a quintet including Jean- Luc Ponty on violin. Some additional cuts were also made, probably to satisfy British censors. The spectacular witch’s flight to Bloksbjerg, the nun’s hysteria in the church and several scenes of torture were shortened. These modifications, as well as running the film at the standardized projection speed of 24 frames per second (instead of the historically accurate 20 fps) to conform to the requirements of sound film, reduced the film's running time from 104 minutes to 77 minutes. Released as Witchcraft Through the Ages it premiered in November 1968, at London’s Times Cinema with British Board of Film Censors 'X' certificate. It was paired with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). It hit the United States at the Elgin, New York's legendary repertory theatre, in February 1970, double-billed with Sergei Parajanov’s Wild Horses (Stevenson 114). Following some of Altman’s attributes of cinema as event, Witchcraft Through the Ages is an example of heterogeneity, as it is a different version of Häxan, based on a deliberate choice stemming from a social and countercultural attitude and also from a commercial need. It locates at the intersection of the discourses of a variety of social groups who came to appreciate the film, revealing its multi-discursivity. The added value of music and narration over film is cultness. From a silent era oddity, Häxan becomes a cult movie and successfully reaches a new audience, mainly young and part of a countercultural movement. Modern music and Burroughs’ voice question the usually accepted hierarchy of film over sound and cause a kind of cult transference, from cult narrator to ‘cultized’ silent movie.

Into the gap Film historians have written about silent films unbound to musical accompaniment as if they were complete unities, consensual objects. Focusing on radically different scores suggests that they are not. “The soundtrack is more than merely a ‘bolt-on’ to the ‘film’ but more an essential part of the film experience” (Donnelly 21). The key here is not the images (‘the

24 film’) but the value that music adds to make a ‘new’ film. Music as an addition is able to remove or add to the original intentions of the film significantly and changes its psychological and emotional landscape, altering one of the basic perceptual aspects of the unified object. For Donnelly, adding newly composed scores to silent films brings musicianship and historical film culture into an unprecedented collision that can produce a radical re-contextualization of the film object. Whichever approach is taken, music is inclined to function as a frame for the film, either enabling to see it as audiences in the past saw the film, or effecting to update the experience and offering a point of entry to a difficult and antiquated film for audiences unfamiliar with the conventions of silent cinema. This point of entry seems to correspond to what Chion calls the ‘gap’ between image and sound. Following Chion’s method of forced marriage, by “reassociating different sounds that seem at first hearing to be somewhat at odds with the accompanying image, the filmmaker can open up a perceptual vacuum into which the mind of the audience must inevitably rush.” (Murch in Chion, Audio-Vision xx) It is this movement ‘into the gap’, to use Chion's phrase, that is the source of the added value, and “the greater the metaphoric distance, or gap, between image and accompanying sound, the greater the value added” (Murch in Chion, Audio-Vision xx). While arguably all soundtracks comment on the films, some make more strident or perplexing comments than others, and those who apparently seem to fit less reveal the most clear audio critique of the visual. This stylistic disassociation between the aural and visual dimensions is inherently inborn in many other audiovisual shows. In opera for example, where the musical component is constant (with a fixed musical score written by the composer) and the visual apparatus is always newly recreated by the stage director. Silent cinema reverses this relationship: the image in the film is fixed and the music is always new (Targa 59). The anachronistic gap that can occur between the audio and video dimensions, the styles of which belong to two different historical periods, is a normal fact in the perception mode of multimedia shows and is not a reason for complaint, while for silent films with added music this is the strongest point of contention and criticism. “Perhaps the most out of the ordinary, jarring or disagreeable marriages of film images and new music provide the most comment from music to film. Perhaps they are most critical in the 'gap' between the film images and the added music” (Donnelly 18). Some examples appear to have a significant distinction between sound and image, to 'go too far' (or ‘too deep’, into the gap) in their transposition of the films to new contexts. This was exactly the average negative consideration expressed by the silent film aficionados for Balch/Burroughs’ version of Häxan. Even so, Witchcraft Through the Ages highlights the heterogeneity of cinema as event. Recognizing the heterogeneous nature of the cinema experience opens the field to consideration of a broad range of objects, processes, and activities (like for example recognizing the existence of multiple versions of a film, based on diverse social and commercial needs, the variety of exhibition spaces where a given film is projected, or the diversity of audiences present) (Altman, Sound 7) and has an especially direct impact on the study of sound, revealing the variety of its components, like for example the voice of a narrator.

The voice of the Devil Since the birth of cinema, the presence of a narrator in a silent film was not unusual. Outside of musical accompaniment, in the silent period theaters, and most of all fairground film shows, could employ “descriptive talkers” or “lecturers” who accompanied the silent images with a spoken monologue that both described what was happening in the film's story and

25 enlivened the screening into a live performance. Other lecturers improvised dialogue not included, for instance, on intertitles (Altman, Silent 140). They were a development from two l9th century forms of entertainment - the ballad singer (who sang tales while pointing out the song's events through a series of sketches or paintings) and the slide-lantern lecturer (who would, literally, present a slide-show and talk about ‘images of the world’ being presented). The most celebrated live narrators were the Japanese benshi, who were star attractions in the silent cinema and survived well into the sound era. In the golden age of benshi performance in the 1920s, there were thousands of performers in Japan. Each benshi provided live narration for silent films (both Japanese and Western films) of their own, and viewers often went to movies to see their favourite benshi’s performance (Cooke 5). In The Voice in Cinema (1999) Chion analyses the role of voice-over narration in sound film developing the notion of acousmetre, a kind of voice-character specific to cinema that is heard but not seen. This disembodied voice seems to come from everywhere and therefore to have no clearly defined limits to its power. In Witchcraft Through the Ages Burrough’s voice has the position of a “commentator-acousmetre, he who never shows himself but who has no personal stage in the image” (Chion, Voice 21). Filmic commentator-acousmetre present four "mysterious powers from being heard and not seen" (Chion, Voice 21): to be everywhere; to see all; to know all; and to have complete power. These powers are usually attributed to God in monotheist religions and Chion proposes that the word of the acousmêtre is like the word of God, and that the "greatest Acousmêtre is God" (Voice, 27). In Witchcraft Through the Ages Burrough’s acousmetric voice performs a textual speech. This kind of speech inherits certain attributes of the intertitles of silent films (in this case it consists primarily of English translations of the original intertitle cards) and has “the power to make visible the images that it evokes through sound—that is, to change the setting, to call up a thing, moment, place, or characters at will” (Chion, Audio-Vision 172). Like the commentator-acousmetre, also textual speech is very powerful, as it is “the bearer of the word, or logos, in a flash causing all of Creation to emerge” (Chion, Film 68). Using the god- like attributes of the acousmetre and of textual speech, Burroughs' voice opens Witchcraft Through the Ages with a droning incantation against a black screen. To the question “How does the Devil talk?” and after viewing this version, Christensen would now probably answer: “Like Burroughs.” Burrough’s one-note monotone voice sets the style for the remainder of his narration. With the exception of this opening magic/poetic gesture, throughout the rest of the film he takes his job as commentator and historian very seriously, presenting an aural soundtrack to Christensen’s series of historical images. His voice becomes synonymous with Christensen’s authority over the film’s historical material. Indeed, Burroughs’ tone lends itself to the dramatic, and it can be compared to Schubert’s romantic violins that previously added emotion to the 1922 original score of Häxan. “Christensen and Burroughs in effect speak at the same time, creating a hyper-narration by giving the disembodied narrator a body that is not his own, but that of the director” (Walker 52). At many points throughout the film Burroughs’ narration breaks off and lets Christensen’s powerful images speak for themselves. Burroughs's spoken word gives it a more unified (if still disjointed) narrative flow. It is less clinical, less pedagogic, and the partized structure is completely gone, though that never really helped to give Christensen's original version much continuity. Burroughs’ commentary makes the film more political, more anti-authoritarian, more ‘beat’. In one scene where Maria the weaver is interrogated by two witch hunters, Burroughs ironically

26 observes: "here we see an example of “good cop/bad cop”, which is still being practiced in police stations over the world." (Stevenson 116). As for the music, Humair’s score, an atmospheric mix of jazz and avant-garde, was written specifically for the film, and its chaotic energy and timing brings a very different experience out of Christensen’s visuals. The jazz enhances Christensen’s playfulness, his dirty sense of humor, and the horror-movie surreality of the demons, devils, and creatures that populated the film’s dark medieval imagination. Furthermore, the shocking images of Christensen‘s Black Mass and the jazz soundtrack are strikingly different from each other, and the music highlights the strangeness of the onscreen images, underscoring the creepiness of Christensen’s portrayals of witches and demons. “The ‘interpretive’ jazz score that Humair designs is only as shocking as the Christensen‘s images on screen. Together, music and image shock the viewers’ senses” (Walker 53). Humair’s score does not serve only to accompany the images on screen, but attempts to highlight certain aspects of the film through his scoring. Creating moments of synchresis, Ponty’s arrangements focus on minute visual details in the film, like the movement of a baby’s hand or dripping blood, and create a link between the visual and the musical that highlights these images for the viewer. “The musical score of Witchcraft Through the Ages competes with the educational aspirations of the film. The film escapes its pronounced didacticism through the scores’ ability to highlight the more emotional aspects of Christensen’s vignettes and dramatizations” (Walker 54). Because of the unusual choice of adding anachronistic music and a voice-over to a silent film, this reinterpretation was heavily criticized and disregarded by silent film experts and aficionados (Stevenson 114-5). Balch’s version of Häxan drew the wrath of underground spokesman Jonas Mekas, who in his 'Movie Journal' column of The Village Voice wrote:

I urge you to see the film despite one unfortunate fact: the version which you'll see is the bastardized "English version" prepared by a well meaning but obviously stupid young man, Antony Balch. It takes stupidity to do what he did with this great film. (…) The film has been destroyed (Mekas, quoted in Stevenson 114).

Despite the negative reviews of the silent film aficionados, it was through Balch’s new version of Häxan that most viewers of the cult film movement of the 1970s came to know Christensen's film.

Cult as event A film containing explicit representations of sex and violence, with morally unacceptable imagery and that has been neglected, forgotten, censored, under-distributed, isolated for its content, or critically mauled and quickly removed from circulation is the perfect candidate to develop a cult following. Häxan was thus born to become a cult movie. For Jerslev, cult cinema’s significance lies in the interaction between film and audience. Jerslev’s notion of cult event or cult culture departs from the ’event’ aspect of a cult film screening to emphasize that instead of indicating a certain genre, cult cinema may be conveniently attached to a certain mode of reception (89). “Cult film is fundamentally an event. A cult film is only brought into existence in so far as one talks of a certain interaction between a text and an audience” (Jerslev 93). The cult event transforms the film into a cult film and positions the spectators as a cult audience. (Jerslev 91) The cultist love of a film is all about taking what is considered of little or no value by society at large, and then reinventing it as a site of extracurricular ‘surplus value’. A cult movie is a ‘value-added’ object. In the case of Witchcraft Through the Ages, part of the cult event that makes the film

27 and the audience interact is Burrough’s narration considered as a spoken word performance. At that time Burroughs was already famous for his spoken word performances, some of which were recorded and circulated on tapes and that were part lecture, part concert, part sermon, part social event, part political protest. Public readings placed Burroughs firmly within a vibrant community in which he was an active participant among peers. These readings proved to be important events for Burroughs as a writer and life-changing events for an audience of established and emerging creative artists. With a very smart choice (once again an attribute of Altman’s cinema as event) Balch uses Burroughs’ fame to introduce an obscure silent film to an audience that was already following the writer and spoken word artist. Witchcraft Through the Ages had its American premiere at Elgin, the most famous midnight movie theatre in New York, and “the midnight movie phenomenon has been the most noted manner by which films were designated as cult (Mathijs and Sexton 13). New York’s midnight movie scene started when, in the late 1960s, underground and avant-garde theaters, with established clienteles and institutional affiliations, started programming risque and exploitative materials. This shift was encouraged when ‘kinky’ foreign art films and American underground films came together, near the end of the 1960s, in an exploitation/art circuit that emphasized the countercultural potential of cinema (Mathijs and Sexton 13). According to Mathijs and Sexton, the advent of the midnight movie circuit captured the moment when the inspirations from the Dionysus cult, the various marginalized (and working-class) cults of utopia through the centuries, and the more recent development towards idolatry and individualized and commodified experiences of religion all became a central component to certain ways of appreciating certain films. Prominent to this moment were movies in which rituals stood central: Häxan and Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) were re-released for late night audiences in the late 1960s because they included, among other things, cultism as a theme within their stories. Freaks’ “one of us” chant and Häxan’s meticulous descriptions of persecutions of cultism and marginalized religious beliefs were centerpieces of such themes (Mathijs and Sexton 138). One more reason for Häxan’s reception as cult (valid for Freaks also) is also its solicitation of freakery – both in its presentations of deviant human bodies as signs of how they challenge taboos, and in its reception by audiences seeing themselves as outsiders to normalized viewing routines. Häxan, for instance, uses representations of old, weathered, disheveled bodies of women accused of witchcraft in opposition to those of corpulent monks who interrogate them to press a point about the ruthlessness of the inquisition. When such markers are acknowledged by audiences looking exactly for non-normativities (as many viewers of Witchcraft Through the Ages did when the film was re-released in the late 1960s), conflations between the film’s argument and its function as a piece of exploitation create an ambivalence upon which a cult reputation can be hinged. (Mathijs and Sexton 103) Following Altman, Witchcraft Through the Ages is at the intersection of multiple motivational trajectories that bring diverse audience members to the theater, revealing its multi- discursivity. Cinema serves as the intersection of a variety of discourses, framed by diverse groups and addressed to populations varying from single individuals to the entire culture. Sharing the same space and time, these discourses commonly hide one another, with a given film-viewing thus successively revealing little bits of each individual discourse. A film does not carry a single message, unified, unilinear, and univocal. Instead, “it is more like a scarred palimpsest, at various points revealing diverse discursive layers, each one recorded at a different point in time” (Altman, Sound 10).

28

Watching and hearing this version today, and even though it is obvious that Humair took great care in reinterpreting the film through his music, it is still not suited to everyone’s taste. It is strangely unsettling in its sped-up action and its modern music. Burroughs’ powerful textual speech injects in spots of irony and dry humour after his fashion and enhance the film’s weird credentials, while the jazz score is amusing in the beginning, but after a while the whole thing goes from novelty to rather cacophonous, a bit intrusive and contradictory to the original film’s tone, and becomes actually more of a distraction. This is the greatest risk when using ‘anachronistic’ music with a silent film, but the same could happen when using ‘period’ or classical music, as it may sound too cliché. This reinterpretation definitely alters the film’s mood, the audience reception, and any sound- specific referents within the film. “With the addition of an avant-garde jazz score, the film’s educational aims become ironic. Häxan’s re-release as a “midnight movie” completely changes Christensen’s original intentions; midnight movies are meant to entertain, not to educate” (Walker 50). This shows how adding a music that is somewhat considered at odds with the accompanying image produces a greater added value, to the point of altering the cultural status of the silent film. This reinterpretation takes Häxan in a new direction, giving it a new life and a new audience, and remains evocative of the hip 1960s, an era of experiments in expression.

29 2.4 A kiss of life for the Witch

Right from cinema’s inception the medium converged with different art forms and media practices characterized by live performed or technically reproducible elements, mostly deploying music in one way or another. In the silent era, the accompaniment of a film screening with live music was used to aesthetically enhance the movie-going experience, since the film itself was not the main attraction per se. When the picture came alive to audience’s astonishment, the lack of sound made the experience uncanny, even though the action on the screen resembled real life and was otherwise comprehensible. Talking and commenting on the film was common and the noisy audience is claimed to be one of the reasons why music was used in the early days of cinema screenings. It was needed to guide the viewers’ attention towards the film, thus making them silent (Cooke 1). Altman has given special attention to the significance of music as a device to attract a prospective audience. Music could attract attention to a show by a performance of live music at the entrance of an exhibition venue or even by loudly playing recorded music on the street. The musicians in the screening room could even play their instruments incredibly loud in order to attract people walking by on the street (Altman, Silent 131). Silent film screenings were not just mechanical reproductions of technically produced material. The particular conditions of these screenings were different, depending on the entire film program they were part of and on their acoustic accompaniment. Because performance sound was controlled by exhibitors, often constituted the majority of the program and allowed for audience involvement, it came to signify the 'liveness' and 'immediacy' that many early observers felt the silent image lacked. Music was an external addition to the moving pictures, and film screenings were only a part of a cultural event, of a performance, that was partly “live” and partly mediated. Music was highly ephemeral, geographically particular, realized by variously skilled individuals, and ‘live,’ even if that ‘liveness’ was a question of turning on a gramophone player and synchronizing different musical cues on disc in the exhibition space itself” (Brown 583). This meant that film viewing was the result of a forced marriage between the ‘live’ and the ‘mechanical,’ and the same happens today with live musical accompaniment of silent films. During the 2017 edition of the Imagine Film Festival held at EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, Dutch band Kinetophone played a live musical accompaniment to Häxan using a mix of classical and electronic music and pop songs. Highlighting some of Altman’s attributes of cinema as event, what emerges from this musical reinterpretation is a performance, partly live and partly mediated, that recalls practices of the past. Songs are very effective in creating moments of synchresis and the use of electronic music highlights the interchange with the culture of a contemporary audience. According to Bosma, silent films are best appreciated the way they were intended to be shown, namely “on the big screen with a live musical accompaniment” (102) because “live music is a kiss of life for silent films” (95). The added value of this reinterpretation is then liveness, with its cultural and historical surplus, which provides an experience that allows of a richer appreciation of both the musical and cinematic components and specificities. The result of this forced marriage is a mainstreamed cult classic, not screened in a midnight movie theatre anymore, but in an institutional context, a film museum, within the frame of a festival dedicated to fantastic films which usually attracts a mixed audience in terms of age and musical taste and, in that particular case, a mix of experts of silent film and young non-specialized cinephiles.

30

Hypermediated performances The performative aspect of cinema is nowhere more apparent than with regard to cinema’s sound identity in the silent era. Altman underlined how critics had neglected important aspects of earlier film exhibition, which demonstrate that for most of its history it was a performance-oriented medium. For example, exhibitors employed presentational differences as a prime method of product differentiation. This strategy was especially salient throughout the silent period, when differences in accompaniment (piano, organ, orchestra, lecturer, voices behind the screen, effects, etc.) served as an important method of individualization. “Instead of considering the elaborate showmanship and diverse accompaniments of the silent era as an anomaly, it must be recognized that film is always the product of performance (more or less self-conscious, more or less complex, more or less commodified)” (Altman, Sound 9). Today the term that is mostly used to define live musical accompaniment to silent films is Live Cinema, although there are multiple interpretations of this term within the practices of contemporary artistic audiovisual productions. Beyond its definition related to a simple live musical accompaniment of films, recently it has also included a ‘new’ one that refers to multi- disciplinary audiovisual projects (made possible by the use of new generations of software that allow to mix, process or generate audio and visuals in real time) like for example real- time cinema with live cameras or storytelling by VJs. A definition of Live Cinema that includes both the old and the new connotation is given by Holly Willis (Research Professor in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California): “I define live cinema as the staging of a live event that includes the presentation of moving images and sounds for an audience with a performance component that calls attention to presence and liveness, as well as to the specificities of site, space and time” (68). Thus Live Cinema is about performance and ephemerality, about the construction and experience of an apparently singular live ‘event.’ One has to ‘be there’ to experience it, and it is this singularity, that is often understood to give live performance its ‘authenticity’ or, in Walter Benjamin’s terminology, its ‘aura’. Although contemporary practices of live musical accompaniment to silent film might initially appear as an attempt to recreate the historical performance context of the silent film era, the whole setting of technological media and artistic issues involved has changed drastically, resulting in a completely new set of circumstances of media combination. Bolter and Grusin refer to this new juxtaposition of multiple media forms and technologies as ‘remediation’ (5). Showing the musicians as performers on a stage is a form of ‘hypermediacy’, which Bolter and Grusin describe as a “style of representation, whose goal is to remind the viewer of the medium” (272). While film as a purely technical medium cannot provide anything tangible about the process of its making, live music allows its audience to directly experience the origin of the sounds and so complements the cinematic events, giving them a specific form of authenticity or immediacy which is cinematically not possible in this way. Live music shifts the mediation of the whole media combination into the foreground as it “create[s] a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience, which can be taken as reality” (53). The special form of hypermediacy that is obtained when combining silent films with live music can provide a reason for the increasing interest in this historical mixed-media practice. The fall-back on the original media combination of silent film and live music provides two forms of authenticity: first, it is like a time travel that makes it possible to partially retrieve the film-going experience of the silent era; and second, it evokes feelings of immediacy and experience that

31 are coupled to hypermediacy. This doubled authenticity guarantees part of the attraction of the ‘new-old’ media format.

Songs for synchresis Another characteristic of this new-old media format is the return of the musician's body in the cinema theatre, a presence industry had previously removed, and that allows audiences to feel film music differently. Spectators respond to the presence of musicians with a certain respect and attention and prevents ‘intrusive’ chatter. Live music ensures that there is always a unique and unrepeatable element to this ‘mechanical’ medium. The performers’ rapport with the screen results in spontaneity and creativity, reasserting the ‘human factor’ that had been eliminated by sound technology. The musicians who performed the live musical accompaniment to Häxan during the 2017 edition of the Imagine Film Festival held at EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam are René Duursma (keys, guitar, vocals), Thomas van den Berg (guitar, vocals, samples, keys) and Sebastiaan Wiering (cello, bass, keys, vocals). Under the name Kinetophone they have been playing live music to accompany silent film classics ever since 2010 with the purpose, as stated on their website, “to reinvigorate old films for new audiences with their modem-day soundtracks” (Kinetophone website). Since 2010 they have written and performed music to classic silent films such as Abel Gance's epic J’Accuse, pioneering avant-garde shorts by Germaine Dulac and Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Arsenal. Kinetophone’s music is a combination of classical and pop music weaved in with electronic soundscapes and elaborate aural textures. Beyond this postmodern blend of musical genres, that serves the film very well, the peculiarity of this reinterpretation is the use of songs. During the scene of a nun’s hysteria in the church, they played their version of “Tainted Love”, originally a Northern soul hit by Gloria Jones, but brought to worldwide success by the techno pop duo Soft Cell in 1981. In other two moments of the film, the band sings “I shall be released” by Bob Dylan and “Get thee behind me Satan” by Irving Berlin. While it may seem strange to use songs as part of the musical accompaniment of a silent film, this was quite common in the silent era, mainly for the evocative function of their lyrics. Films were often accompanied by songs matched with the images, not by sound but by words. “If the images show an empty glass, the accompaniment might be built around the song lyrics for "How Dry I Am" (Altman, Nickelodeon 130). According to Chion, songs can create strong moments of synchresis, managing to suspend all confinements. During the few minutes of a song there is no longer a separation between the film’s here and now, between the diegetic and nondiegetic, but the boundary between film and audience is suspended (Film 429). This effect is produced by the lyrics that, according to Chion, provide a new dimension because “through them the film functions at two levels: the general level of a he, she, I, or you in the lyrics, which presents all women and all men, and the level of the specific story we’re watching on the screen, of this man and this woman.” (Film 404) The song takes the role of a pivot or turntable, a point of contact and opens a horizon, a perspective, an escape route for characters mired in their individual story, making them connect with the audience. In the case of Kinetophone’s reinterpretation of Häxan, the power that songs have in engaging the audience with the film is further strengthened by the electronic music soundscape, which affects especially young people, making the film less alien through the incorporation of sounds from 'their' culture.

32 Electronic sounds for contemporary audiences The use of electronic music to score silent films was investigated by Blair Davis, an instructor in film studies at Simon Fraser University, in order to determine strategies to increase students overall interest in silent films. Davis used the response to the screenings of his entire class of approximately ninety students, aged predominantly eighteen to twenty-four years, to determine the positive and negative effects of the use of electronic music and its implications for film spectatorship (82) and trying to document the self-reported effect of enhancement and/or distraction created by the total aural/visual experience during screenings (83). Davis showed Häxan to a class of approximately forty students. A musical playlist, consisting mainly of tracks by electronic musicians Amon Tobin and DJ Spooky was selected to accompany the film, with the attempt to match the tempo and rhythm of individual musical tracks to the mood or pace of specific scenes from the film (84). The result of the survey showed that 78.1 percent of this group saw the electronic music as enhancing their engagement with the film. A further 18.7 percent found that the music detracted, while only 3.1 percent remained neutral. In contrast, only 50 percent of these students would have found a piano or organ score beneficial, while only 46.8 percent would have benefited from a symphonic score. The overall survey results indicate that the majority of students in almost all of the scenarios preferred the modem electronic soundtrack and that the positive response to this music outweighed the negative response (Davis, 85). A recurring notion among focus group participants was that using modern electronic music served to make silent films feel ‘more modern’ or 'contemporary’. At the same time, many noted that electronic music also allowed the silent films screened to feel “more ‘artistic’ or ‘avant- garde’, stating that the films seemed as if they could have been created fairly recently as opposed to being eight or nine decades old” (Davis 87). In turn, students classified piano, organ and orchestral scores as being “older” forms of music, forms they considered more “traditional” and “old fashioned”. One student also described such "older" forms of music as seeming "romantic" in so far as it was "overly melodramatic" at times, or even "cliched." Some also described such older forms of music as being highly "distracting" because they did not convey the emotions that these students felt should be reflected in the film’s score (Davis 88). Therefore, if an ‘older generation’ of silent film enthusiasts views the incorporation of electronic music into screenings as a sacrilege, modern youth see it as “a natural extension of a modern media environment that requires them to actively intuit relationships between diverse forms of stimuli“ (Davis 91). In this way, the silent film is able to transcend the world of cinematheques and university classrooms with which these films are normally associated, bringing silent films to audiences that normally would not otherwise watch them. In this respect, electronic music highlights Altman’s notion of interchange. The construction of cinema as event reveals the continuous interchange between production and reception of the filmic text. Beyond analyzing the interchanges that take place through the intermediary of the text, also the interchanges between the production-text-reception system and the culture(s) at large must be taken into consideration. In this area sounds plays an important role. “Sound’s ability to diffuse the cinema event throughout the culture is matched by sound’s equal capacity to infuse cinema with elements of the culture’s soundscape” (Altman, Sound 14). Through the mediation of the culture’s other sound technologies - live and recorded music, radio, television, and many others - film sound is in a constant state of interchange with the culture at large.

33 CONCLUSION

Research on silent cinema music tries to reconstruct modes of musical accompaniment for films, the relations acted out between different media and the historical reception of these modes. Given the difficult state of research materials, scarce and all too often lost, these reconstructions can never be complete or final. While studies on silent film music have dealt mostly with the analysis of single scores, they have seldom tried to take advantage of the availability of multiple musical interpretations of the same film. The biggest issue regarding this kind of analysis is that the amount of historical documents that provide information about the practice of rescoring silent films is small and not systematized. The largest number of comparable items presents itself to the contemporary researcher in the form of original compositions, compilations and musical settings that followed the silent film renaissance of the 1980s, but even in the case of the most recent materials a relevant number of new silent film scores have not been published on CD or released on video. Most of all, live performances are still unrecorded in most cases. Despite the apparent contradiction involved in recording an event, as this denies its inherent ephemerality, this kind of document consists of primary evidence of the many intentions behind the practice of rescoring silent films, and becomes crucial for the study, research and construction of this practice’s shared memory. Using Altman’s approach for the study of silent film music, which can generate an understanding of cinema as a chain of processes of production, exhibition and reception that constitutes this practice, a comparison between a historical score and a contemporary one can provide insights into the transformation of the elements that structure the performative aspect of film. Adding music to silent films allows for the continual reinterpretation of silent films, and academic studies must take this mutability into account in order to understand how the heterogeneous and material aspects of silent film sounds, including also production and reception circumstances, can be used to make this form of presentation effective.

As I have shown in this research, there is an astonishing parallel to the use of music in the silent era and the use of music today. In the silent era music was an important element to raise the status and cultural prestige of cinema and to attract audiences with the promise of something beyond the everyday. There was undeniably a ‘special’ quality connected with the silent film screening that was imbedded in the music that was played live in the theatre alongside the projected film on screen. Like today, the musical accompaniment to a silent film changed over time and location to suit the audience and the venue. Today music is again at the centre of spreading an interest in silent films, and also is furnishing a different value to this form of cinema. Music constitutes a bridge between the old silent film and the modern audience and has become a means for both musicians and audiences to understand this film art anew. It is probably futile to expect that the musical traditions of silent cinema will ever be fully restored, as it is impossible to watch the films in the same way as in the silent era, after so many decades of experience with sound films, and after so much of the original repertoire has either been forgotten or has lost any semblance of freshness. Moreover, since the silent era technological developments regarding film fruition and sound recording and reproduction have impressively evolved and the range of possibilities regarding the musical accompaniment to silent films has exponentially grown. The practice of adding music to a silent film was, and still is, very precarious. Film programmers at cinemateques, curator of DVD or Blu-Ray editions and festival organizers face the challenge to match silent films with

34 the ‘right’ music. A fair compromise must be found between using the music to attract an audience and the commonly shared idea that the (new) score must ‘serve the film’, that implies a somewhat subdued approach where the score supports and comments on the film while remaining in the shadows, without distorting it and turning it into something else. The result can be exciting and meaningful, but it can be also dull and boring. If the new score goes too unnoticed, it can end in monotone neutrality, while on the other hand, too much expressivity harbours the risk of being intrusive and irritating for appreciating the film. Responses to particular forms of silent film presentation depend a great deal on personal taste and on the person‘s overall approach to the subjects of silent film, music, and art in general. Experts and historical enthusiasts of silent film, when compared with a non- specialized audience may have very different perspectives about the proper form of presentation. However, as I have shown in this research, although the reactions to music of different genres from different eras may be subjective, if the purpose of the rescoring is attracting a new audience, some of the performative elements of film can be used in a more or less deliberate way to produce an effective result.

Häxan has led many lives, experienced many deaths, and undergone more than one resurrection: the context in which the film may be experienced has undergone considerable change and its reinterpretations have played a fundamental role in keeping it ‘alive’. The aim of this research was to discover what is the added value that results from various musical reinterpretations of Häxan focusing on the ways in which they are structured and realized. The analysis of the case study shows that as the music added to a silent film can be ever changing, so is the added value it brings. It manifests in an interaction with the audience that can be established not only by the music, but also by the technologies involved in the recording and reproduction of the new score and by other possible heterogeneous sonic elements like voice and songs. As the case of the reconstruction of the original score of Häxan shows, the ‘special’ quality of the live musical accompaniment of the premiere has been remediated through new technologies into modern media culture. Thanks to the surround sound technology, the DVD edition of the film makes it possible to recreate an immersive soundscape and to repeat the experience of the event over and over again from the comfort of a living room. This remediation adds to Häxan a kind of historical authenticity, because presenters try to recreate a reaction in the audience as similar as possible to that of original audiences, but this is only realizable with the aid of digital means, with the historical context being understood only through new representational technologies. Music as an addition can change the original intentions of a film, and Balch’s version of Häxan, like Moroder’s Metropolis, confirms Chion’s assumption that adding sounds that are somewhat considered at odds with the accompanying image produces a greater added value. This can spark negative reactions of the silent film aficionados, but it can successfully expose the film to a radical new audience, to the point of altering its cultural status, and as a result in this case Häxan becomes a cult movie. The most effective element of this rescoring is the combination of jazz music and Burroughs’ voice over narration which questions the usually accepted hierarchy of film over sound and cause a recontextualization of the film introducing the film to Burrough’s followers through a kind of cult transference, from cult narrator to ‘cultized’ silent movie. Silent films with live musical accompaniment are still the best option for appreciating the performative aspect of cinema. Despite since the silent film era the whole setting of

35 technological media involved has changed drastically, the performance elements of this kind of event still call attention to presence, liveness and ephemerality. Kinetophone’s live musical accompaniment to Häxan interacts with the audience through the physical presence of the musicians in the theatre, the use of songs, which create strong moments of synchresis suspending the distance between the film and the audience, and the use of electronic sounds, which attracts younger generations, making the film less alien through the incorporation of sounds from 'their' culture. The added value is liveness and is effective in two ways: first, it is like a time travel that makes it possible for contemporary audiences to partially retrieve the film-going experience of the silent era; and second, the collective fruition of the film with the music in the here-and-now generates a richer appreciation of the musical and cinematic specificities..

The contemporary variety of music for silent films manifests a 'debate' on the nature of history and objects sourced in the past; it debates the types of history. Historiographic process is evident in each film, and indeed they might be seen as part of a 'debate' about how film heritage should be used, and how far silent cinema as an aesthetic medium can be re- invented or re-animated and presented to new and contemporary audiences. A notable demarcation exists between scores for silent films that espouse the notion of historical veracity and those that aim to furnish something new. At heart, this shows a profound difference in conception of silent films: on the one hand historically-accurate musical accompaniment to silent films works to ‘museumize’ the film, to make it a guaranteed historical object imbued with the period of their production, on the other novel scores aim to renew the film as a cultural object and frame it for a new audience. Within the film archival world this contrast regarding the use of film heritage has always existed. These apparently contrasting approaches are simply two faces of the same love for film heritage, and they are like the yin and yang of audiovisual archiving. Culture can take both but will be in trouble should one side of the debate win over the other. While film (and musical) heritage should preserve the presentation of films accompanied in a historical manner, it cannot afford to remove the imaginative culture of film accompaniment as a developmental process. Silent cinema requires each generation of curators and performers to engage in creative reinterpretations, and an informed knowledge and use of the elements that structure the rescoring practice, of the technologies involved in its production and reception, and of the heterogeneous and material aspects of film sounds is fundamental for making them effective in attracting and interacting with contemporary audiences.

36 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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