A Day of Silents
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A DAY OF SILENTS | DECEMBER 7, 2019 | CASTRO THEATRE A DAY of SILENTS MUSICIANS SCHEDULE, DECEMBER 7, 2019 BERKLEE SILENT FILM 11: 0 0 AM FATTY + BUSTER Music by Donald Sosin ORCHESTRA Incubated at the world-renowned Berklee 1:00 PM REDSKIN School of Music in Boston, Berklee Silent Film Music by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra Orchestra is made up of student composers and musicians who collaborate on original scores 3:15PM WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA for silent-era films under the leadership of Emmy Music by Donald Sosin nominee Sheldon Mirowitz. BSFO performed its 5:00 PM THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE scores for The Last Laugh, Varieté, The Freshman, Music by Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra and The Man Who Laughs at past SFSFF events and makes its first appearance at A Day of Silents 8:00PM THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA to accompany The Phantom of the Opera. Music by Berklee Silent Film Orchestra MONT ALTO MOTION PICTURE ORCHESTRA TABLE OF CONTENTS A chamber ensemble that revives the tradition of 2 FATTY + BUSTER silent-film orchestras, Mont Alto Motion Picture essay by Imogen Sara Smith Orchestra has recorded and toured widely, creating vibrant, emotional, and historically ap- 6 WHAT ARBUCKLE SAYS propriate scores for more than 125 films. Con- excerpts 1917–1919 sisting of musicians Rodney Sauer, Britt Swenson, 8 REDSKIN David Short, Brian Collins, and Dawn Kramer, essay by Scott Simmon the ensemble appears twice to accompany 12 HISTORY OF A LOCATION: Redskin and The Marriage Circle, combining CANYON DE CHELLY as always precision playing with expert musical selections to bring these silent-era films to life. 14 WOMAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA essay by Shari Kizirian 18 WOMAN’S PLACE IN DONALD SOSIN PHOTOPLAY PRODUCTION For close to half a century pianist Donald Sosin by Madame Alice Blaché has been creating and performing silent-film 20 THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE music, both live and for recordings. He is the essay by Jeanine Basinger resident accompanist at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Museum of the Moving 24 ACTING LIKE LUBITSCH by Margarita Landazuri Image, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. His scores are heard regularly at major festivals 26 THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA worldwide, on Turner Classic Movies, and on essay by Monica Nolan more than sixty DVD releases. He plays for both 30 HOW TO KILL A VILLAIN the Fatty + Buster and the Alice Guy Blaché by Fritzi Kramer programs. 32 CONTRIBUTORS / ABOUT SFSFF 38 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1 FATTY + BUSTER THE COMIQUE WORLD OF FATTY ARBUCKLE AND BUSTER KEATON LIVE MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT BY DONALD SOSIN GOOD NIGHT, NURSE (1918), THE COOK (1918), and THE GARAGE (1919) DIRECTED BY and starring ROSCOE “FATTY” ARBUCKLE with featured player BUSTER KEATON PRINT SOURCE Lobster Films ne of the most consequential chance instantly smitten with filmmaking. Fascinated by the meetings in cinema history occurred on camera, he tore apart Arbuckle’s Bell and Howell Oa rainy day in March 1917 in New York and reassembled it, not satisfied until he understood City. Or so goes the story Buster Keaton often told how every last gear, sprocket, and shutter worked. about walking down Broadway and bumping into an Movies clicked with Keaton’s visual and mechanical old friend, Lou Anger, who introduced his compan- genius and suited his innate perfectionism. ion, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. A silent film comedian then at the peak of his popularity, Arbuckle invited In the informal, rough-and-tumble freedom of Keaton, a twenty-one-year-old vaudeville veteran Arbuckle’s Comique Film Corporation (called who had never set foot in a movie studio, to come by “Cumeeky” by its members), Keaton became a and do a scene in his latest two-reeler, The Butcher performer, gag writer, stunt man, and assistant Boy. The thirty-year-old Arbuckle had recently director. “I just watched Arbuckle do it,” was his been enticed away from Mack Sennett’s Keystone account of how he learned to make films. A deft Studio by producer Joseph Schenck, who offered and often elegant director, Arbuckle liked expansive him his own independent company. Keaton was at backgrounds and self-referential jokes about cinema. a turning point, too, having recently left his family’s He was also extraordinarily generous and ego-less, knockabout comedy act, The Three Keatons—fed readily ceding space to his talented protégé. Over up with the act’s declining fortunes and his father’s the course of their fourteen short comedies together, increasingly heavy drinking—and gotten his first solo Keaton vaulted from third banana to equal partner, gig in a prestigious stage revue, The Passing Show and the films themselves evolved from frenetic, Key- of 1917. But everything changed when he stepped stone-style anarchy to the cohesive plots, unhurried in front of the camera—a moment we can still watch, pacing, and elaborate, precisely-executed gags that since, as Keaton loved to boast, his first scene in The became Keaton’s trademarks. Butcher Boy was done in a single take. Arbuckle, Arbuckle once said that Keaton “lived in the camera,” impressed with his comic inventiveness and peerless an insight that shows the deep understanding at gifts as a punching bag, promptly offered him a job. the heart of their friendship. Roscoe and Buster Keaton tore up his lucrative theater contract and were both gentle souls who loved practical jokes never looked back. and making people laugh. They shared a birthplace Whether Keaton’s Broadway encounter really was (Kansas), a history as child performers, and difficult serendipitous (or whether, as some scholars have relationships with their fathers. Both emerged from suggested, he was intentionally recruited), he was vaudeville, the primordial soup of twentieth-century 2 3 Picture courtesy of Photofest entertainment. A tough school in which survival for plot or character definition; Arbuckle can range comedienne Alice Lake, who depended on reliably making a hit with audiences, within the same film from childlike innocence to sly, plays a charming lunatic in vaudeville honed its graduates into an invincible amoral naughtiness. His signature on screen is the Good Night, Nurse. Now and army of dancers, singers, actors, and comedians who startling contrast between his huge bulk and his nim- then the mayhem lets up went forth to conquer movies, radio, and television. bleness and dexterity, which he demonstrates in his long enough to allow for a Vaudeville, and its shameful cousin minstrelsy, role as the titular cook, casually juggling knives and bit of subtle underplaying, or also spawned a brand of humor that was surreal, flapjacks. (Off screen he hated to be called “Fatty,” a close-up that reveals how absurdist, mined with irreverent spoofs and wild and Buster said his friend’s avoirdupois was mostly shockingly good-looking the free-association, carried by the personalities and muscle. Louise Brooks compared dancing with Ros- youthful Keaton was. Those supercharged energy of the performers. coe to “floating in the arms of a huge doughnut.”)The eyes, those cheekbones, that Cook’s high point comes when Roscoe and Buster— profile! To throw a sack of You can see this style at peak zaniness in Arbuckle- the latter playing a flirtatious waiter—are infected flour at this face (as Arbuckle Keaton shorts like and The Cook and Good Night, by an “Egyptian” dance craze, burlesquing what was did in The Butcher Boy) is like Nurse (both 1918). Considered lost until a print was already a burlesque (via Little Egypt and other mid- vandalizing a work of art. discovered in the attic of a Norwegian hospital in way “hoochie-coochie” performers) of belly dance. 1998, The Cook illustrates Arbuckle’s usual formula: Roscoe dons a colander headdress and saucepan Keaton, of course, never saw disintegrating car; the Rube Goldberg device that pick a setting (here, a restaurant) and milk it for all bra and proceeds to conflate Salome (with a head of himself this way, and in these films he is game for whisks his and Roscoe’s blankets and nightshirts off the gags it is worth; once they are exhausted, move cabbage) and Cleopatra (with a string of frankfurters anything, appearing as a woman with an umbrella in when they are called to their duty as firemen; their to a different setting (here, a seaside amusement as the asp). Keaton, who was drafted into the army the opening scene of Good Night, Nurse and turning perfectly choreographed lockstep march down the park) and start over. There is little if any concern after making The Cook, spent much of his World War up later in the same film as a doctor in a bloody street with Roscoe shielding Buster’s exposed rear I career performing a similar smock wielding a giant machete. One of the wacki- from a cop after he has lost his trousers. They make act for officers in France as est, most delightful, and delirious of the Comique a fine team, but that was not their future. After The “Princess Rajah,” dressed in films, Good Night, Nurse opens with Roscoe pleas- Garage, Arbuckle went to Paramount to star in fea- a mess kit. antly soused on a rainy evening and ends with him sprinting in his scanties down a road littered with ture films, while Keaton moved into his own studio, The Comique films resemble fainting fat men. In between, there is a blizzard-like bankrolled by Schenck. live-action cartoons, and the pillow fight to rival the one in Jean Vigo’s Zero de Both men suffered devastating falls from grace— players—especially Keaton Conduite, an avant-garde operating-table point-of- Arbuckle in 1921, when he was accused of raping and Al St.