Silent No Longer
- Details
- Published on Wednesday, 01 February 2012 23:22
- Written by Matt Robinson
Alloy Orchestra presents “Wild and Weird” films at Somerville Theatre
Oh, how the mighty have fallen! Was a time when people waited for weeks for the latest black and white celluloid to come to their town so they could hunker down for the afternoon with a tub of popcorn and the sweet strains of an live musical performance wafting through the theatre.
Fortunately, this truly fine art of real-time film scoring has not died. On February 4 at 8 PM, the world famous Alloy Orchestra (www.alloyorchestra. com) will bring their genre-defining live performance back to the Somerville Theatre in support of Wild and Weird, an appropriately-entitled festival of silent short films to which the Orchestra will add their improvisational magic.
While AO is known for scoring such classics as “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Metamorphosis,” founder Ken Winokur says that this series will be special even for them. “These are all films that defy the stereotypes of what silent films are,” Winokur says.
As they are so different from anything his band has worked with before (and also from so many other silent films), Winokur and his fellow Alloy-ists Terry Donohue and Roger Miller spent an inordinate amount of time preparing this program. “I have been looking at these films for years,” Winokur says, “thinking about how to put them together to show to audiences.”
The resulting collection, he says, is “fast paced, humorous, and sometimes just downright weird.” Working with silent film producer David Shepard, Winokur has also released a DVD of the entire series. However, as any fan can tell you, there is nothing quite like a live AO show!
From Wadislaw Starewicz’s 1912 film The Cameraman’s Revenge, to Hans Richter’s 1926 Dadaist masterpiece Filmstudie to J. Stuart Blackman’s 1909 Princess Nicotine, these films run the gamut in topic and technique, but all of them are brought together by AO’s stunning scores and energetic accompaniment.
So even if you are a jaded IMAX-aholic, come back to a simpler (and in many ways better) era of film with the help of Alloy Orchestra and have an experience that is wild and weird and a whole lot of fun!
