They seem like an odd pair at first. Cantor’s collection of old performance footage is clearly about the music, with a visual augmentation—only people who already love Lester Young’s music would have much interest in watching him play. The silents are, or would seem to be, all about the images, with a musical augmentation. But the more I see of both (Cantor two or three times a year for the past ten years, the silents three or four days of full immersion every year for about the same span) the more I see how they speak to me in the same way.
Some of the films Cantor screens were created as cinema, others are simple records of musicians playing. There are musical interludes made for Hollywood movies, “soundies” made for the weird visual Panoram jukeboxes of the ‘40s, and straight concert or TV performances. The most cinematic can be visually brilliant (track down Jammin’ the Blues from 1944), but even the simplest can be visually fascinating—the eyes and body language of a great musician in mid-solo, the shared glances and minuscule clues shared by band mates, the occasional glimpse of the crowd (an auditorium full of hip Danes listening to Bill Evans in 1966).Silent movies have always depended on music to work. After their first few years, every movie theater included some kind of music—piano, organ, or, in the big city picture palaces, a full orchestra. The movies were made in the awareness that they would be playing to music, and it didn’t take long for the studios to start sending out scores with their film canisters so musicians could play what the producers imagined as the aural half of their creation.
In the age of sound, most silent movies have been issued with recorded musical tracks, but the S. F. Silent Film Festival only uses live music—by the warm and delicate Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, the subtly startling Matti Bye Ensemble, the gymnastically multi-instrumental Stephen Horne, and others equally distinct—almost always newly composed by the musicians. In doing so, they’ve turned silent films into experiences as musical as they are visual.
Both the jazz clips and the silent features explore the interplay of image and sound, liberated from the word. Between them, they say things that words never could.Mark Cantor’s show this Saturday is called “Broadway to Hollywood and All That Jazz”—music written for stage shows and movies by the Gershwin brothers, Rodgers and Hart, and the usual suspects by great jazz musicians and singers. He isn’t announcing which jazz musicians and singers, but his collection is vast and his taste is as broad as it is good. (Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan are almost guaranteed, and I’m hoping for a Lennie Tristano.)
I’m especially happy with the SFSFF this year. For two years they’ve scheduled it at the same time as the San Diego Comic Con, which meant that I missed most of the Con those years (no big deal), but also that my friend Joe Filice—who had been my regular companion and source of strength on many twelve-hour days of movie after movie—couldn’t come, because he had family plans centering on the Con. This year the silents are in May, Comic Con is in July, and all is well with the world.
The silent festival’s schedule leads off with a solid crowd pleaser, Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, then jumps to China at the brink of World War II for The Song of the Fisherman, starring one of my heartthrobs, Wang Renmei. Then comes Midnight Madness, one of those high-speed, high-passion melodramas that Hollywood got so good at right before the switch to sound, then some artful Swedish bleakness with The Parson’s Widow, then Dolores Del Rio glowing supernally in Ramona, and then what looks to be a truly bizarre piece of Soviet science fiction called Cosmic Voyage. Which concludes Day Two and leaves only twelve more movies. I’m going to be tired, sore, and happy.
