The Silent Era

The beginning

A silent movie is a film without a soundtrack, a form that, historically, dates from the period before the advent of sound film, going from 1895 to 1927.
The first public screenings of silent movies were done during the intervals between the various acts of vaudeville performances, being offered and received as “curiosities”.

Soon after that, original and specific scores began to be more common in filmmaking; following the example of L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise,  composers were commissioned to write specifically for filmmaking, and it became common practice to distribute films together with their scores, to be played in the theatre. We shall cite for example the musicians Hans Erdmann for Nosferatu (1921, directed by F.W. Murnau), Edmund Meisel for Battleship Potemkin, Dmitri Shostakivich for The New Babylon (1929, directed by Kozintsev and Trauberg), and Gottfried Huppertz for Die Nibelungen and Metropolis.The idea of combining images and sound, as a matter of fact, is almost as old as cinema itself, but the first film with sound, The Jazz Singer would only appear toward the end of the 1920s, in 1927 to be precise.

“Cinema is closer to music than to painting, because it is not made of images but shots, inside which time just as in music”.
(Eric Rohmer)

Historians and scholars of the seventh art call the period before the advent of sound “the silent era”. During that time span, filmmaking nonetheless achieved a high level of quality, so much so that after sound was introduced a few years had to pass before the quality of silent movies was matched, and then surpassed. Movies, actually, were not altogether “silent”; or rather, their screenings were not:  theatres great and small, indeed, used to show them with live music accompaniment, which acted as  a soundtrack, generally played by a pianist or an organist, or even an orchestra when it could be afforded.

Theatres were the perfect location for showing silent movies, for these required no complex equipment, just a simple screen. Screenings then would include explanations of the scenes, with a commentator reading captions, or through written comments. From the very start, however, it was clear that music played a crucial role, heightening and anticipating the strength of images, and giving the viewer hints of the emotional tone of the scenes to come.

The music of the first silent movies was taken from the works of classical composers (often mixed or arranged), from contemporary dance music, or it was improvised: this meant, of course, that directors had no control over the aptness of the music accompanying their movies; when full-length feature films made their appearance, however, because of their more complex narrative structure, matching images and sound in a more consistent way was felt as more of a necessity.

A first solution to these queries of the early directors was offered by Joseph Carl Breil’s score for the film The Birth of a Nation (1915). The director D. W. Griffith found himself in close agreement with the  musician, even though not all the music used in the film was by Breil, some of it was taken from works by Weber, Bellini, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Grieg and Wagner.

“Music is 50% of a film”
(George Lucas)

It is therefore important to underline how totally new and revolutionary the concept of “synchronization” that the above entailed was: it was a type of music written specifically for filmmaking, it had to  integrate and move along with the images, not only completing but actually accomplishing the director’s general view, yet the composer was left with ample margins of creativity. Music was no longer a simple accompaniment but had become integral part of the final artistic product; indeed, cinema, as a work of art, now consisted of the fusion between images and sound.

Metropolis, a ‘Cult-Movie’

Let us take for example Gottfried Huppertz, a musician from Cologne who composed the score for Metropolis: he wasn’t a famous composer, but thanks to his creativity and far-sightedness he wrote an impressive, monumental score, thus contributing to the making of one of the finest examples of synergy between image and sound, now considered a cult movie. By working closely and in great harmony with Fritz Lang during the entire planning and realization of the film, Huppertz was able to make his music fit the director’s visual concept perfectly. Other known composers who were commissioned music for silent movies were Darius Milhaud, Camille Saint-Saëns, Arthur Honegger, Paul Hindemith, Erik Satie and George Antheil.

Fritz Lang and Brigitte Helm (centre)
play jazz on set

Chaplin as a musician

And now we must open a chapter dedicated to the “greatest genius of cinema”: Charlie Chaplin. Indeed, he was not only an actor, but also a director, a scriptwriter, a producer and even a “musician”, writing music for many of his films. Although he could neither read nor write music notation (which, in that period was not totally unheard of – even Gershwin for a long time sought the help of assistances), Chaplin had a great talent for music. He could play the piano by ear and composed melodies by humming them. He would project the edited film on a screen and play the music he had in his mind while, beside him, an expert composer and arranger jotted down the score.
Chaplin was very demanding; if there was something that did not sound as it should he would correct it immediately; the way he created music was absolutely perfect and it represents what is nowadays defined “Chaplin’s melodic structure”.
After being the king of silent movies, Charles Chaplin was able to renew his cinema when sound made its entrance, finding new ways to put his music talent to good use. “One of the positive aspects of sound film is that it gave me control over music; it was then that I decided to compose it myself,” he declared.

Charlie Chaplin at the piano

“I endeavoured to write romantic music […] wanting to give my comedies an emotional dimension. The arrangers and composers I worked with rarely understood this. They wanted entertaining music. I would explain to them that I didn’t want any competition between music and images, that melody was to act as a counterpoint to action, it had to be serious and refined, express feeling, without which a work of art is always incomplete. There is nothing that is as adventurous and exciting as to listen for the first time to a piece of music you have written played by a fifty-element orchestra. (C. Chaplin)

In Italy

In this panorama, we must not forget to mention two Italian films: “Cabiria” and “Rapsodia Satanica”.

Cabiria – the first Italian “colossal film” – was originally set to music by Manlio Mazza (1914 edition); in 1931 it was re-edited by the director Giovanni Pastrone – who foresaw the advent of sound movies with the music and sound effects magnetized on the actual film – who added Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Sinfonia del fuoco to comment the scene of Moloch’s sacrifice.

The score of the other Italian title, Rapsodia Satanica (1915) is by the renowned Leghorn composer Pietro
Mascagni; he was indeed the first Italian musician to compose music to be synchronized with images, a job he defined “demanding, long and very difficult”.

Whether or not initially, the purpose of music was that of covering the noise of the projector, in silent movies it came to have the more important task of giving a sense of continuity to the show, while the few moments of silence were left to underline the more dramatic moments.

The early film theoretician Ricciotto Canudo reasoned along the same guidelines when, in an essay from 1911, he states: “At the cinema all is meant to hold the attention taut, almost suspended, nothing must slack the vice-like grip that holds the viewer’s mind riveted to the screen. Fast movements, which here become monstrously precise, almost like on a clock that has images in place of numbers, excite modern spectators, who are accustomed to a faster and faster lifestyle. “Real” life is therefore represented in its quintessence: speed”.

To achieve this continuity, many composers drew inspiration from the operatic style of Richard Wagner and his leitmotiv, which places a sort of music tag on recurring ideas, attitudes, characters, objects or places; this technique, used in opera and in symphonic music, was now applied to the storytelling in filmmaking.

“Filmmaking is the language of images, yet images do not speak. The language of images is music. One ought to disconnect cinematography from literature and associate it with music, for it ought to be the visual language of music.” (Luigi Pirandello)

The Ben-Hur “case”

The importance of music specifically composed for certain images also leads us to mention single or singular cases that brought about a real revolution in the fruition of films; one of them was undoubtedly Ben Hur (from 1925). Its original sound score, signed by the then famous William Axt, has indeed been
superseded – because of its superior music quality and for being as spectacular as its visual counterpart – by Carl Davis’s 1987 version, commissioned to him on the occasion of the film’s restoration, and in which we can detect a post-Wagner – or even a Strauss-like – flavour.

Poster of Ben-Hur,
one of the first Kolossal
considered the most expensive
silent film ever made.

And so the concept of fusing images and sound turned into a dialogue: music gave voice to the characters,  their actions and feelings; music became the sound of a siren, a cannon shot, the noise of a battle, and so on; but ultimately music turned into “words”, those words that were missing and that were admirably substituted by notes which, becoming “onomatopoeic”, wrapped the spectator in the deepest emotions, evoked by the synergic work of director and composer.

The synchronized performance

It is also interesting to underline some of the technical aspects inherent to the creative process of making a film with synchronized music: in the score it became common practice to insert a “guide” (consisting of drawn sketches or captions indicating specific points in the film – a scene, a movement, a certain action, etc.) which made it possible to produce the perfect sync between images and sound. As a consequence, the presence of a conductor specialized in the so-called “synchronized performance” became increasingly necessary, until it was considered indispensable; this specific professional skill, only attainable through a careful and detailed preparatory study and through a lot of experience, became a must in order to ensure the perfect and emotionally satisfying fruition of a film screened with live orchestral score.

THE SOUND FILMS WITH LIVE ORCHESTRA

In order to understand the full extent of this artistic skill, we must also mention the performance of Sound Films with live orchestra. With the advent of sound, the number of scores performed live drastically decreased, until they almost disappeared; nonetheless they have not lost their fascination and ability to captivate audiences. In recent times, some major studios have revived the “total immersion” experience of viewing a film with its music played live by screening special versions with live performance of the soundtrack, just like for the silent movies of old.

A famous example is Pirates of the Caribbeans, which was originally conceived with music playing a preponderant role, such as to justify a great orchestra and chorus on stage making for a highly spectacular show.
For other films of great success the opposite process took place: after the film’s release, a soundless version was produced, to be screened with live soundtrack.

The Cine-concert – a perfect mix of entertainment and culture – is indeed something that emotionally involves the public; it wants to be a way to bring the new generations closer to forms of expression which are less familiar to them, to arouse in them the desire to investigate and rediscover a complex and fascinating form of art.

To quote once again the above-mentioned pioneer of cinema Canudo, in his essay we find this sentence, which helps us to understand some nuances from his day: “Modern audiences are admirably able to abstract, for they can take delight in the most absolute abstractions of life. At the Olympia, for example, the public frenziedly applauded the flower-bedecked phonograph that sat on stage, which, with its shiny copper horn, had just finished playing a love duet… The device triumphed, the public applauded the ghost sound of some faraway, or dead, actors. It is in this spirit that people flock to the movies.” (Ricciotto Canudo, 1911)

The objective is therefore to find a common denominator to it all, one going back to the initial idea, that is to say that culture “may become an opportunity of personal and human growth” and, increasingly, “a way to create something significant through emotions”.  

“Cinema is one of the three universal languages;
the other two are mathematics and music.”
(Frank Capra)

Frate Sole

Frate Sole (Francis of Assisi)

FRATE SOLE – 1918
Restored version 1998

Original soundtrack by Luigi Mancinelli
Film performed with live choir and orchestra

Gioele Muglialdo, conductor

Foreword

Thanks to the restoration of the only extant original positive copy made by Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, we can now present a film that should be appreciated, first of all, for its remarkable ability to avoid the easy pitfalls of rhetoric and hagiography.
The life of St. Francis is described through a succession of tableaux clearly inspired by the great Italian paintings of the 14th and 15th centuries, from which they inherit not only the figurative richness but also the instantly communicative qualities.
The uniqueness of Frate Sole also lies in the fact that its soundtrack calls not only for an orchestra but also for a chorus.

The first true Colossal on St. Francis

A masterful example of the fruitful and powerful partnership between cinema and music is the Italian silent movie Frate Sole, dated 1918. “Silent” so to speak, for it was presented as a “Symphonic and Choral Poem in four Cantos by Luigi Mancinelli, on a tale by Mario Corsi”. This movie further revolutionized film music thanks to the input of the conductor and composer Luigi Mancinelli, who first raised awareness of Wagner’s music in Italy in 1880 and was the architect of the success of Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana in 1890. As a conductor, he also premièred Tosca at London’s Covent Garden; Carmen in Madrid; and Pagliacci in New York, for the reopening of the Met in 1893.

Frate Sole, filmed in Assisi, Gubbio, Perugia and at Lake Trasimeno, is unquestionably the most important movie by the journalist, playwright and director Mario Corsi (1892-1954). Along with him, we should not forget the film’s producer and co-director Ugo Falena, a brilliant moviemaker, writer for the theatre and producer, who in his brief experience had a profound effect on early Italian cinema. Frate Sole was, indeed, released by a company of his, Tespi Film, with the collaboration of the music critic Eugenio Sacerdoti and the scene-painter Duilio Cambellotti. The movie takes inspiration from the Canticle written by St. Francis in Umbrian dialect shortly prior to his death (1226) to celebrate the Creator through his creatures: water, fire, the stars, the moon and even death. Mario Corsi worked out four tableaux: “The Kiss to the Leper”, “On the Footsteps of the Poverello of Assisi”, “The Temple”, and “The Stigmata”.

An “opera-film”

Mario Corsi, who directed the film with Ugo Falena, in the magazine “Cinema” (1938) describes the context and atmosphere in which the Frate Sole project took shape:

«Back from the front in 1916 because of a wound, like many other writers and journalists I too became captivated by cinema, and for two years I wrote one script after the other, some of which were fairly successful.
One day in 1917 I was called upon by the lawyer Eugenio Sacerdoti (a former journalist as well as a pugnacious music critic) and by the playwright Ugo Falena, who then successfully directed Tespi Film.

They had come to ask me for a new subject for a movie:

“We want you to work on Frate Sole: a grand film. The famous maestro Luigi Mancinelli will compose the music for it. It will be an opera-film. Ugo Falena will be the artistic director, assisted by you and by the painter Duilio Cambellotti for the sets and costumes. You have four months of time for the plot and scriptwriting. Do you accept?”

I did, unaware of what I was getting into, in terms of effort and responsibility. Only later, after consulting the Franciscan Library and collecting all the most reliable sources on the life of the Saint, did I fully grasp what a challenging and dangerous task I had undertaken.
I buried myself in that vast bibliography and little by little the magnificent world of Medieval Italian life took shape before my eyes, with the Poverello as a great, immortal beam of light.
And I set down to work.

There were three diverse ways in which I could portray the Saint of Assisi: I could follow the legend; show the drama of Francis’s life as he progressively detached himself from the things of this world; or show some historical episodes of his life. I chose the latter. However, since this was undoubtedly the most difficult one for a filmmaker, who needs a certain action continuity and development interest, I blended in the second one.

Thus, in Frate Sole, history and drama are closely linked. I went even further, making the son of the rich merchant of Assisi not just the protagonist, as it was then intended in cinema, but one of the many characters in the picture that I proposed to animate.
Six months later the stage was set and our troupe set up camp in Assisi, with a small army of actors, walk-ins, technicians and secretaries. There we carefully chose the sites and began to film the outdoor scenes of Frate Sole: in front of and in the cloister of the Basilica, and two processions inside the Basilica itself.

For about a month Assisi and Gubbio offered their citizens and visitors a very curious sight indeed. But the most distinctive and moving view was that of the real Franciscans, who bent over backwards to help us shooting certain scenes: they truly proved to be clever, humble and precious assistants in our far from easy and effortless task. The production of Frate Sole then continued for almost four more months at the theatre of Tespi Film in Rome. The première of the movie, announced as a “Franciscan recreation in 4 cantos by Mario Corsi, with a sacred poem for orchestra and choruses by Luigi Mancinelli” took place on 7th June 1918 at the Augusteo theatre, the first time that venue held a similar event, and was hailed as a true work of art. Luigi Mancinelli himself was on the podium, conducting the theatre’s symphony orchestra. Savoy princes, ministers, high prelates and all the mundane and intellectual of Rome were present. The success of both film and music was resounding.
The Italian press dedicated many articles to Frate Sole, signed by the most important theatre and music critics. Frate Sole also marked a new concept of music for the cinema: for the first time, music represented a complementary element, exercising a powerful function.

Shortly afterwards, the film’s success was crowned by the solemn and official recognition of the Vatican, with an unforgettable screening in the Aula Magna of the Palace of the Chancellery, in front of a dozen Cardinals, and several Archbishops and high Prelates and dignitaries of the Papal Court: I can guarantee that the impressive sight of that beautiful and vast hall full of such a chosen and enthusiastic audience was no less fascinating than the images being projected on the screen to the accompaniment of the orchestra and chorus conducted by Maestro Mancinelli. After the screening, the Cardinals and eminent Monsignors declared that “… the Church can expect from the cinema, like from Art, great and noble things”.»
[Mario Corsi -“Cinema”, 1938]

The filming of Frate Sole; front row, left
to right: Ugo Falena, Silvia Malinverni
and Duilio Cambellotti.
Gubbio, September 1917
(photo by Giorgio Ricci)

The Music: Luigi Mancinelli

Luigi Mancinelli (1848, Orvieto – 1921, Rome) was a noted Italian composer of works for the stage, concert hall and church as well as for the early cinema. After studying in Florence, he served as an orchestral cellist before becoming a conductor at the Teatro Morlacchi in Perugia. He was succeeded as pianoforte professor at the Bologna Conservatory in 1886 by Giuseppe Martucci. As if to anticipate the celebrated rise to fame of Arturo Toscanini, Mancinelli stepped from his role as cellist to the podium to conduct Verdi’s Aida, a feat which earned him an engagement as conductor at the Teatro Apollo in Rome where he appeared until 1881. Subsequently, his growing fame took him for conducting engagements to Paris, Milan, Bologna, Venice, London, Madrid and the Metropolitan Opera in New York: Mancinelli was on the conductors' roster of the New York Metropolitan Opera for 10 years, ending in 1903. In that capacity he conducted 531 performances of a variety of mainstream operas by Italian, French and German composers. During his nine seasons as conductor there he led the first Met performances of Werther, Falstaff, Samson and Dalilah, Le Cid, The Magic Flute, La Bohème, Don Giovanni and Ernani, as well as his own opera Ero and Leandro. He also conducted in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Lisbon – where he committed suicide in the aftermath of a bankruptcy.
His works for the stage reflect a dramatic temperament. His first opera Isora di Provenza succeeded in Bologna in 1884, but failed in Naples in 1886. His next opera, Ero and Leandro, brought him international attention via premieres in London and New York, its libretto by the admiring composer and librettist, Arrigo Boito. Paolo and Francesca from 1907 failed – in part due to the unfashionable idealism and classicism of its libretto in an era when the ideals of verismo opera, championed by Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Puccini, were exciting audiences everywhere. However, the music of Paolo and Francesca is both rich in texture and has moments of real inspiration.
Brief examples of his artistry as a conductor can be heard on the Mapleson Cylinders, which were recorded during actual Metropolitan Opera performances at the beginning of the 20th century. One of the clearest of these primitive-sounding cylinders consists of a brief extract from the "Torture Scene" in Tosca, recorded in 1903. On it, the Italian tenor Emilio De Marchi appears as Mario Cavaradossi, the role which he had created at the opera's world premiere in Rome three years earlier.
The main theater in his birthplace of Orvieto was renamed the Teatro Mancinelli in his honor.

NOTE: Despite Mancinelli’s strenuous battle to give instrumental music in Italy a nobler status and aesthetic autonomy, the Italian creative system was such that his efforts remained focused on
opera. His three operas nowadays are considered an ideal link between the best output of the Scapigliatura movement and the following D’annunzio style, which they anticipate, for some aspects.
Mancinelli’s invariable predilection for a “static” type of dramaturgy betrays his intrinsic indifference towards the requirements of the stage: he composed his operas “by default”, as he would a symphonic poem, that is to say conceiving a series of sound frescos coalesced by means of the Leitmotive technique.

Not by chance, Mancinelli’s last compositions were for the cinema, a genre that requiring recurrent motifs to be associated to the expressive cores of a film (at the time of Frate Sole movies were still silent).
When he wrote his score for Frate Sole, Mancinelli drew on his first experiences as a composer of ‘stage music’: like those works, his film scores were conceived as a “symphonic and choral poem to be performed viewing the film, not as a simple comment”.
His music – composed after the film had already been cut and without being able to be technologically coupled to the images shown – has no referential function related to the unfolding of the images, but it becomes “a show exactly parallel to that of the director”.
In Mancinelli’s view, therefore, what happened on the screen – or on the stage, when speaking of opera – only partially influenced his composing, which remained essentially symphonic.

All movies on San Francesco

Recap Info

1998 Restored version
Original music by Luigi Mancinelli
Revision and new synchronization by Gioele Muglialdo (All Rights Reserved)

Rapsodia Satanica

Rapsodia Satanica

Original soundtrack by Pietro Mascagni
Restored version 1996
In collaboration with “Cineteca di Milano”

“One of the most important silent movies of its generation, strongly inspired by D'Annunzio. Its soundtrack was composed by Pietro Mascagni, one of the finest composers of his day and the first, in Italy, to write music synchronized with images.”

Foreword

Rapsodia Satanica is a milestone in the history of music and of cinema. It was the first time that a famous composer agreed to write a detailed soundtrack for a movie, closely following all the stages of its birth, from the screenwriting to the filming.

The making of Rapsodia Satanica was as troubled as the destiny of the film’s protagonist, Countess Alba d’Oltrevita, interpreted by the divine Lyda Borelli. Completed in the spring of 1915, the masterpiece directed by Nino Oxilia was only released in cinemas in 1917, due to mysterious internal disputes at Cines: almost three years of waiting, before the world could see what could be described as the most ambitious effort, to that day, to produce a comprehensive work of art for the screen.

Italian Cinema vs Hollywood

Though we almost habitually think of Hollywood as always at the forefront of movie production, prior to World War I international cinema was led and dominated by Italy: in fact, ironically in light of later developments, the Americans were then much given to copying the Italians. However, with the coming of war this once staggeringly imaginative and powerful industry was swept away, with Italian cinema not recovering its status until the 1960s. Nevertheless, at the dawn of featurefilm making, the Italians led the way. They were the first to grasp that cinema could also be art. Then, too, in Italy there was no stigma attached to being involved in film. On the contrary, many artists who had made their name in other areas dabbled at one time or another in cinema, exploring the possibilities of the new medium. One of Italy’s leading directors at the time was Nino Oxilia, and in 1915 he conceived an ambitious project, a “complete work” involving artists who were all leaders in their chosen field. He therefore hired popular stage actress Lyda Borelli to be his star, the poet Fausto Maria Martini to write his intertitles, and the composer Pietro Mascagni to write the score.

Birth of the Movie

The point here is that enough positive energy surrounded the young filmmaker to sustain him in a constructive way during the production of Rapsodia Satanica. And this climate of openness to new ideas and cosmopolitan trends may indicate why Oxilia celebrates women’s sense of independence with an explicit citation of Loïe Fuller’s dancing performed by Lyda Borelli in Rapsodia Satanica. By 1915 Loïe Fuller, an American dancer who triumphed in Paris, was a wellestablished icon of women’s emancipation and the artistic integration of technology, science and imagination. Most significantly, her dances, performed in complete darkness with phosphorescent veils and colored electric lights mounted on wands, were comparable to a proto-cinematic show; even the Italian Futurists praised Fuller’s work unreservedly.
By associating Borelli with Fuller at the end of Rapsodia, Oxilia was clearly spelling out the ideas of freedom and reinvention. Such a feminist use of a famous diva was no small statement, and, as such, it put him in a potentially compromising position.

But referencing Fuller was not the only risk Oxilia was ready to take. In Rapsodia, Borelli, before turning into a sort of butterfly of the future, impersonates a cruel Salome. This reference was mandatory because Borelli conquered Italian audiences by playing Salome on stage in 1902. Yet it was also a bit risky to associate film and femininity with an Orientalist myth. On the other hand, cinema’s bad reputation as the conduit of evil from the East to the West, did nothing to slow down the Orientalist vogue in early Italian film culture.
Through Borelli dressed as Salome, Oxilia’s Rapsodia explores the transformation of the cruel femme fatale into the New Woman of modernity, while it also interrogates the cinema about its affinities with the outdoors or the natural world in contrast to the alliance between theatre and architecture, or the indoors and furniture. Oxilia’s Rapsodia was shot and finished in 1914, but not distributed until 1917 due to unspecified difficulties. It seems that there was some rivalry with Mario Caserini (1874-1920), who was based in Rome and linked to Cines just as Oxilia was. Perhaps Caserini himself was instrumental in holding the film up. One of the producers of the film at Cines was the Baron Alberto Fassini, also known as Alfa, who had strong ties with the Bank of Rome and financed the project. Fassini brought in the composer Pietro Mascagni and asked him to write the music.

Mascagni’s Soundtrack

The collaboration between Nino Oxilia (director) and Pietro Mascagni on the movie Rapsodia Satanica was crucial. Though the filming had been completed in 1915, the movie was only released in 1917, once the score had been fully orchestrated. Mascagni himself was on the podium, at that belated debut, conducting an orchestra that played live.
Reluctant to tackle other subjects that were offered to him, Pietro Mascagni accepted instead to work for this movie, the symbolic character of which suited his stage of development, by then far from Verismo and close to the aesthetics of the decadent movement.
Despite some initial wavering, and though economic considerations are often quoted as the primary cause of his accepting the job, Mascagni wrote this soundtrack with an enthusiasm, a constructive and positive attitude that justify the exceptional quality of this score.
He expressly required viewing the film, and composed constantly and punctually referring to the images, though he never slipped into using synchronized and obviously ornamental, descriptive music. On the contrary, the music of Rapsodia Satanica adds insight to the film, succeeding, so to speak, in “welding” the image fragmentation, typical of the language of cinema, into a cohesive arc, which only music could achieve. Following what is now a widespread practice, though often disadvantageous for the composer, the score was composed after the movie; but this did not mean that Mascagni eased into the work of adapting to an established situation: rather, he reinterpreted the succession of images.

For music that comments words and describes things is nothing special; but music that comments, indeed identifies itself with a female character (even that of Lyda Borelli) and expresses, by making them intelligible and perceptible, all of her changes of physiognomy, corresponding to different states of mind, we could never have imagined it.

- "La Gazzetta del Popolo”, February 1918

Rediscovery and restoration

The rediscovery of Rapsodia Satanica is an extreme case: its reconstruction took place slowly and by steps, under our very eyes. An unexpected miracle was slowly taking shape; a gradual backwards process of decomposition, a patient re-composition. It was as if this masterpiece did not want to reveal itself all at once: might it have been too blinding?
At first there was a single copy, ugly, in black and white. Yet it was already clear to us that this was a magnificent film. Then the music Mascagni expressly wrote for Oxilia’s movie was discovered: a new surprise. Finally, a good copy in colour was found. From the point of view of colour, Rapsodia Satanica poses a new problem, for – a unique case in the history of cinema? – the stencil colouring, toning and imbibition techniques are not used alternatively but simultaneously. On monochrome images we thus have coloured details […]. Despite this, the result of the restoration, made in 1996 by Cineteca di Bologna and Cinémathèque Suisse, is extraordinary. Here colour fully accomplishes the ambition of the film to be a total art.

[Eric de Kuyper, Rapsodia satanica o il fremito del colore, “Cinegrafie”, n. 9, 1996]

Lyda Borelli’s Satanic Rhapsody: The Cinema and the Occult

Discussing Nino Oxilia’s film Satanic Rhapsody starring Lyda Borelli, the author examines the influence of Bergsonism on the perception of cinema right before and during World War I. In particular, she points out the intersection between the film and, among other references, the tradition of the early Italian diva film, the plastic dynamism of Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni, the dance/performance art of Loïe Fuller, and the emerging figure of the New Woman.

Nino Oxilia’s Rapsodia Satanica (1915), or Satanic Rhapsody, with Lyda Borelli, is an important silent film to examine because of the ways in which it weaves together so many cultural threads of its period. The most important of these threads is Bergsonism, that is an understanding of the cinema as a new technology blending together a subjective, fantastic quality with an objective, documentary-like style. Originally, in Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson (1998) associated the cinema of his day with science and the illusions of intelligence. This is the case because the motion studies that he knew by Etienne-Jules Marey were so analytical and compartmentalizing that they did not, during the course of observation, take into account the subjective powers of memory, intuition and imagination. Yet, through Giovanni Papini, an Italian disciple of Bergson, this opposition between cinema and subjectivity became much less rigid.[1] By referring to the print of Rapsodia Satanica restored by the Cineteca di Bologna, in this essay I will argue that Nino Oxilia probably knew Bergson’s work through his friend, the painter and film producer Pier Antonio Gariazzo. I will also contend that, just like Papini, Oxilia feels that the cinema is a combination of fantastic and documentary-like moments, so that his style alternates betweeen outdoor scenes with natural lighting and indoor episodes with a Caravaggesque chiaroscuro. This mix of styles is all about the transition from old to new, the passage from the stuffy interiors of a castle to freer gardens with butterflies, winds, clouds, and trees. In the case of Rapsodia, the theme of an identity in search of change applies, of course, to the film-diva Lyda Borelli.

Rapsodia Satanica is a diva-film, that is a work built around a female star whose marketing prestige overshadowed even the reputation of the director, Nino Oxilia. Although widely used in contemporary English, the word diva in 1915 Italy meant something different from what it means today. Most people associate the term with a strong, beautiful and dangerous woman, derived from the nineteenth-century femme fatale of painting and literature. Such a definition is relevant to the film-diva of early Italian cinema, but only in a limited way, since the female stars of that period were characterized by a suffering and maternal aura (mater dolorosa) which the American femme fatales never adopted. Furthermore, in early Italian cinema a diva-film meant a melodrama with Orientalist décor dealing with women’s issues such as aging, abandonment, divorce, adultery, pregnancy, employment and so forth.

In the case of Rapsodia Satanica, Borelli’s character becomes the conceptual centerpiece of the whole film. To be sure, she was a famous star of the stage, until 1913 when she agreed to work in Everlasting Love with director Mario Caserini. Borelli’s success with her first film experience was enormous: a new film genre was born along with a new kind of female stardom, so that the young actress’ manners became a fashionable mode of behaviour for millions of young Italian women. In the wake of such an explosion of celebrity for Borelli, when the young Nino Oxilia was chosen by Cines, a Roman production house to direct Rapsodia Satanica, it was a great opportunity for his artistic career. As a film concerned with romance, aging, physical beauty, and personal happiness for a powerful woman who lives alone, Rapsodia Satanica fits within the genre of the diva-film, but Oxilia used every element at his disposal to raise the stakes of the genre itself from within and to move the whole project in a more philosophical and experimental direction.

More specifically, there are at least two reasons why Oxilia’s Rapsodia Satanica stands out in comparision to similar films from the same period. Firstly, Rapsodia Satanica exhibits a fascination with the late nineteenth-century obsession with occult forces intertwined with an Orientalist agenda. Just a few years before the shooting of Oxilia’s film, the Italians’ taste for the exotic and the esoteric had been kindled by the arrival of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Rome. Secondly, Rapsodia Satanica is concerned with the theme of temporality, or the so-called “fourth dimension,” a key topic in Italian circles studying the borderline between scientific and paranormal phenomena. The film’s preoccupation with time demonstrates the wide-spread influence of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration. In contrast to a traditional, linear, and teleological understanding of history, Bergson’s duration or the resilience of an imaginative impulse—élan vital—was a whole new way of thinking about subjectivity and creativity which shaped the ideas of many Italian intellectuals in Oxilia’s time. To better understand how so many different strands play themselves out in Rapsodia, I will devote a series of sections to a close-up examination of the artistic and intellectual network of forces that have shaped this little-known but unusual, “experimental” melodrama.

Nino Oxilia

Born in Turin, Nino Oxilia (1889-1917) was involved in poetry, songwriting, and theatre, before turning to film. As a young man, he was a bohemian; it might be going too far to call Oxilia a protofeminist, but he was a friend of poet Guido Gozzano and his companion, the writer Amalia Guglielminetti. This high-profile couple was engaged in debates about social reform and the emancipation of women (though Gozzano’s inclinations were more melancholic and conservative than Oxilia’s). Turin at the time was teeming with Socialists, suffragettes, and ladies active in philanthropy and salons; due to its proximity to France, Turin was also a center of filmmaking for the rest of Italy. Vittorio Calcina, the first representative of the Lumiere Brothers in Italy, was based there. Between the eighteen-eighties and eighteen-nineties, Turin had become, through Edmondo De Amicis’ heartbreaking feuilletons about immigration, poverty, and education, the city of patriotic piety, socialism, and the Italian Risorgimento. Antonio Gramsci, another native of Turin, split from the Socialists in 1919 to found the brand new Communist Party in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. Turin was the city of criminal anthropology. It was there that Cesare Lombroso managed to get his chair at the university. One component of the emerging industral triangle with Milan and Genoa, Turin was different from other Italian cities due to the scientific, secular tradition fostered by the French Enlightment across the Alps.

While the Scapigliatura was an artistic youth movement inspired by the French boheme, all sorts of mystical and religious cults, as well as esoteric and exotic fashions, were also flourishing there as a reaction against the mathematical certitude at the service of industry and the Turinese liberalconservative oligarchy. Oxilia grew up in this Turinese climate of technological and artistic experimentation where irrational beliefs went hand in hand with scientific testing. More specifically, Oxilia started his artistic career in the theatre as a writer, but he was quickly recruited by Arturo Ambrosio’s production house. By 1912, Oxilia became very close to Pier Antonio Gariazzo, a painter, filmmaker, and producer; he was also the founder of Savoia Film, a company that specialized in contemporary dramas. Always eager to be informed about the latest trend, Gariazzo dabbled in philosophy, loved adventure, and traveled extensively (his experiences in Indonesia inspired several paintings). Turin was also the home of Adriano Tilgher, a minor philosopher, who became a disciple of Henri Bergson and wrote the book Art, Knowledge and Reality (1911) (Arte, conoscenza e realtà). In this stimulating environment, the young Oxilia met his future fiancée, Maria Jacobini, a young actress who looked like Mary Pickford and was also the niece of a Vatican-based cardinal. Jacobini left her parents’ house in Rome amid great scandal, to become a diva and devote herself entirely to the cinema. Oxilia fell in love and became her Pygmalion. In 1913, after many projects in the Turinese film environment, Oxilia signed a contract with Cines, a prestigious production house based in Rome, which asked him to work with Francesca Bertini for Sangue Blue through its subsidiary company, Celio. In 1915 Oxilia wrote Il Fior di Male, a film beautifully interpreted by Lyda Borelli for the director Carmine Gallone. In 1916, when the brief season of divas was nearly over, and blood and death were flooding the Italian screens, Oxilia shot a couple of war newsreels set in the Balkans. His images were so gruesome that the censorship board intervened. In 1917 Oxilia died on the front line, blown to pieces by a bomb during the battle of Monte Tomba. He was one among many artists and intellectuals of that confused yet remarkable generation who died in the Great War; the painter Umberto Boccioni and the architect Antonio Sant’Elia met the same fate. The diva-film, thus, found itself lacking intellectual mentors to improve the genre and open it up to experimentation with new ideas about women and visual technologies.

Overall Oxilia’s style as a director was quite fluid, and it is, therefore, difficult to determine exactly what his specific contributions were. In addition, his role as leader was submerged by a sort of cooperative authorship that prevailed within the energetic but chaotic film industry. So open to experimentation was Oxilia that, during the shooting of Ananke (Fate, 1915) with Leda Gys, Maria Jacobini, and Maria’s sister, Diomira Jacobini, he let the three divas handle most of the creative decisions and limited himself to the role of set designer. What is sure, however, is that he directed not only Bertini in Sangue Blue and Borelli in Rapsodia Satanica, but also Pina Menichelli in Il Papà (Daddy, 1915) and in Il Sottomarino 27 (Submarine 27, 1915), two films that unfortunately have been lost. Because he worked with the most important divas of his period, it is likely that Oxilia had a reputation inside the industry which was competitive with that of Mario Caserini, Carmine Gallone, and Giovanni Pastrone. Between 1912 and 1917, the year of his death, Oxilia was involved in at least twenty-four films—all of them made one after another and at breackneck speed. 

“Grinning in the shadows, the demon awaits its prey...”

Synopsis

Though society pays homage to the position and wealth of the Countess Alba d’Oltrevini (Lyda Borelli), in reality she is a lonely old woman. After an evening spent surrounded by youth and beauty, Alba is left alone to mourn all that she has lost in life. As she passes a painting representing a scene from Faust, she finds herself feeling envious. As she moves on with a sigh, a satanic figure emerges from the frame... As Alba studies her reflection in a mirror, Mephisto (Ugo Bazzini) moves silently to her side and places a hand upon her shoulder. She screams, and recoils in terror. Mephisto calms her, and then explains that he has come to offer her a bargain: he can restore her youth and beauty, but in exchange she can never fall in love. He offers her a small statuette, a symbol of love: by breaking it, she accepts his conditions and renounces love forever. Alba hesitates, but finally casts the object to the ground. A laughing Mephisto inverts his hourglass...

Rapsodia Satantica and Faust

Rapsodia Satanica is a gender-switched version of the legend of Faust. 
The desperate longing of the elderly Alba d’Oltrevita (“dawn before life”) for her lost youth invokes the appearance of Mephisto, who slips out of a painting to offer Alba a literal deal with the devil...
Following on from John Gottowt’s earlier performance as Mr Scapinelli in The Student Of Prague, Rapsodia Satanica offers up another devilish figure who clearly enjoys his work.
As he lurks and spies and chuckles to himself at the foolishness of mortals, Ugo Brazzini is an unnerving yet oddly likeable Mephisto.
Meanwhile, Lyda Borelli’s performance as Alba is everything that we tend to associate with silent cinema, all extravagant gestures and dramatic poses; however, it is highly likely that this was a deliberate choice by Nino Oxalia, who sets his film in a stylised, unrealistic world which abounds with symbolism. Borelli herself is – at least during this part of the film – repeatedly linked with emblems of new life such as flowers and butterflies, and uses her flowing dresses and wraps and gauzy veils to maintain the visual connection. 
It should also be noted that, in addition to the emphatic presence of the film’s leading lady, Rapsodia Satanica offers a range of more subtle touches to the viewer, such as the imaginative use of mirrors and other reflective surfaces, and any number of striking compositions. The location shooting also catches the eye, particularly the slightly misty lighting effects that turn real settings into another form of unreality.
Mephisto tells Alba that she can have back her youth and her beauty, but in exchange she must renounce love forever. Alba hesitates painfully – after all, what is the use of youth and beauty if not to enjoy love? – but in the end she accepts the bargain, casting to the ground a small statuette representing love as Mephisto inverts his hour-glass.
Instantly, Alba is restored. Mephisto hands her the small mirror before which she was sobbing heartbrokenly when he appeared. She stares into it, entranced, letting loose her long hair, now dark again, admiring her face, and running her hands over the smooth, youthful skin of her neck and shoulders.
She does not notice that a smiling Mephisto is silently contemplating the symbol of love, which did not break when it struck the floor...

Recap Info

* This film can also be performed with piano accompaniment

Metropolis

Metropolis: A film Icon Restored

In a silent movie, the music is the film’s voice. When that music has been planned and composed in close collaboration with the filmmaker and during the shooting itself, then it is an extraordinarily powerful voice, integra to the emotion and drama.
(Among the most famous examples is Prokofiev’s music for Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky.) By extension, an original silent movie score is in some ways a script – a guide to scenes and pacing.
The 2010 restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis restores scenes previously thought lost, scenes that bring into clearer focus the human element that infuses the science fiction. For film enthusiasts, this is an opportunity to see Metropolis in a form that is as close to the 1927 original as we’re ever likely to see.
For music enthusiasts, just as exciting is the opportunity we now have to hear Gottfried Huppertz’s score in its entirety, and in context. Huppertz’s music played a key role in the restoration process.
When the Buenos Aires 16mm copy of the film surfaced in 2008, it was initially thought that the known gaps in previous restorations could simply be filled with the new material. The situation turned out to be far more complicated, and it was the detailed information in the various copies of the score and Huppertz’s journal, as well as the music’s highly gestural character, that enabled the dramaturgy of the original to be recreated.
There’s an atmosphere of extravagance when the full forces of a symphony orchestra accompany a silent film in the concert hall. It’s exceptional for us, and yet this is how early films such as Metropolis were experienced. There’s a reason cinemas were called ‘palaces’. In this case, the extravagance and lavishness of the music complements the ambition and breathtaking conception of Lang’s film. 

The discovery

It was a film archivist’s dream come true.
In 2008, in the vaults of a Buenos Aires film museum, Fernando Peña and Paula Felix-Didier found a 16mm negative of the longest existing version of one of the world’s most famous incomplete films, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis of 1927. The negative contained about 25 minutes of the film that had hitherto been presumed lost. It’s hard to overstate the importance of the discovery.

Even in its reduced and somewhat incomprehensible pre-2008 state, Metropolis had achieved legendary status as an important historical work of art, as well as providing the inspiration for many classics of world cinema. James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935), for instance, owe much to the technical brilliance of the laboratory that produces Lang’s evil robot Maria. Charlie Chaplin’s assembly line in Modern Times (1936) is reminiscent of Lang’s frightening images of repetitive drudgery at the Heart Machine, and the exterior of the Tyrell Tower in Ridley Scott’s Blade 6 Runner (1982) bears an uncanny likeness to Lang’s New Tower of Babel. Other references reside in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey (1968), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997), George Lucas’s The Phantom Menace (1999), Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd The Wall (1982) and John Schlesinger’s The Day of the Locust (1974).

The flooding of the Workers’ City was one of the most elaborate scenes of the production. Director Fritz Lang (left) on set.

Film-lovers are indeed fortunate that a negative of Metropolis had been acquired for Argentine distribution during the few weeks between the date of the world premiere, in Berlin on 10 January 1927, and April 1927, when the German distributor withdrew Metropolis from distribution and replaced it with a drastically shortened version. This was in line with cuts made to the US version released by Paramount in New York on 7 March 1927, reducing the film’s length from 4,189 metres to 3,241 metres. The deleted negative footage is presumed destroyed, which means that the most complete remaining version is the copy found in Buenos Aires. It’s presumed that the original Argentine 35mm negative was also destroyed, but not before a copy was made by a private collector. This copy was in turn destroyed after a government agency transferred the movie from its (dangerously) inflammable nitrate stock to the safer acetate stock. Unfortunately, the transfer was done only on 16mm acetate stock, which resulted in a serious loss of quality. No attempt appears to have been made to clean the print of dirt and scratches before the transfer, so the resulting copy was what film preservationist Martin Körber called ‘the worst material I’ve ever seen in my life. Never have I seen a film as ruined as this one’.
Before the Buenos Aires discovery, the longest existing version of Metropolis had been assembled, in 2001, by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation, using the Paramount negative as its basis with help from other copies recovered from New York, London, Moscow and Canberra. The result still ran short by about 25 minutes.
Following the Buenos Aires discovery, the Murnau Foundation combined the 16mm segments of the hitherto missing footage with the best of all the other available 35mm versions to produce a 35mm version that is probably the closest to the original Berlin version we’ll ever get to see. The painstaking reconstruction of Metropolis was aided by the existence of a piano version of the music score that accompanied the film at its Berlin premiere.

With its 1,019 cues for synchronising what’s happening on the screen, this score remains, paradoxically, the most reliable evidence of the duration and narrative order of the original version of the film. With the Australian  premiere presentation of Metropolis (1927/2010) – the screening of the restored film accompanied by Gottfried Huppertz’s complete score – Sydney audiences are thus in the privileged position of being able to experience, for the first time, the film as it was shown for those few weeks in Berlin in 1927.

photo: Maria’s metamorphosis (Brigitte Helm)

The Film And Its Creation

Metropolis was produced in the second period of Weimar cinema (1924–29), when the German currency had been stabilised and art and cinema eschewed post-war Expressionist sensitivities for a style known as Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity, or New Sobriety). The period also witnessed a higher public consciousness of the power of America in influencing Germany’s future, through its domination of the international film market and its aggressive pursuit of the new industrial doctrines of Taylorism and Fordism. Traditional German authoritarian values were challenged by Amerikanismus, a more
open, democratic and modern social order threatening the two main Weimar contestants: the Old Order, smarting over the indignity of war reparations, and the Left, licking its wounds over its failure to establish soviets in the immediate post-war period.

‘FaceTime’ c.1927. Ruler Joh Fredersen speaks via video link to Grot, warden of the Heart Machine. (Alfred Abel and Heinrich George)

Metropolis was expected to restore German cultural pride in the face of the enthusiastic public reception to cultural challenges from the Soviet Union, spearheaded by Sergei Eisenstein’s masterpiece Battleship Potemkin (1925), which opened in Germany in 1926. Metropolis was a project of the UFA studio, the
largest in Germany following the privatisation of the former wartime propaganda unit.
The film’s producer, Erich Pommer, had achieved distinction with The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), The Last Laugh (1924), and two earlier Lang films: Dr Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) and The Nibelungs. Lang himself

was the most celebrated director in Germany at the time. He and his screen writer wife, Thea von Harbou, were riding a wave of popularity after The Nibelungs became ‘the cultural event of the year 1924’. Von Harbou was a successful author before becoming a leading screenwriter, and her novel of Metropolis (which reads much like a film script) was serialised in the press as part of the massive publicity campaign leading to the film’s glittering premiere. The press fed the public a regular diet of photographs of celebrities visiting the huge film set, and statistics of the scale and scope of the production, which took 310 days and 60 nights to film, employed 36,000 extras, and used 25,000 special effects.
Metropolis was the most expensive movie made anywhere up to that time, but it was a disaster at the box office. It precipitated a major restructure of the UFA studio and severely dented the German industry’s plans to resist US encroachment. Even so, the film is nowadays reckoned as one of the most important films ever made, and its appeal is only bound to increase as the new, virtually complete version becomes known.
How can this be explained? Just what do successive generations of filmgoers find appealing in a science fiction fable about labour relations involving the absolute ruler of a huge metropolis, his pampered son, a female labour agitator, a robotic clone of the agitator created by a mad scientist, and thousands of anonymous, downtrodden and workers?

The film’s endurance probably hangs on the inability of German Expressionism ever to be really out of fashion. There always seems to be a time or place where, like now, public disillusionment with the order of things can only be expressed in such a distinctive way as Expressionism did, distorting reality with angry intent. Freder the pampered son doesn’t actually see the dreadful machine turn into Moloch, but Lang has no need to paint the scene with a dream sequence to make his point. Nor, too, would the workers change shifts or burn a witch in such precisely choreographed formation, but we are willing to suspend disbelief to appreciate the full horror of their situation.
This is not to say that Metropolis is a totally Expressionist film, only that it’s the Expressionist elements that survive the test of time. When it comes to the film  holding its exalted place in cultural history, the love story, the religious mysticism and the naïve ending on the cathedral steps are trumped by the spectacular architectural sets, the frightening machines, the faceless workers, the mad scientist and his scheming robot.

As Berlin critic Willy Haas pointed out on the day after its premiere, Metropolis steers a safe course between most of the ideological contests swirling around Weimar Germany at the time, mixing

Haas may be claiming that the film’s message was motivated more by fashion than passion, but the word ‘polemic’ might suggest a more charitable interpretation. The troubles faced by the German distributors of The Battleship Potemkin may have alerted Lang to the unlikelihood of his getting any bold ‘polemical’ statements past his financial backers – which included Paramount – let alone through the national and state censors. Perhaps all Lang felt he could do was present symbols of issues of the day without coming down too strongly in favour of either side. The ten-hour clock that drives the workers to exhaustion is, for instance, symbolic of the industrialists’ contemporary attempts to roll back the eight-hour day, wrung from them in a worker-employer accord following the failed 1918 revolution.
Whatever its intentions, Lang’s team succeeded in creating a splendid fantasy piece of its time, a document which feeds succeeding generations’ imaginations of an extraordinary era in modern history, even if it only canvasses (without resolving) the noisy debates of the period.

The Director

Friedrich Christian Anton Lang was born in Vienna on 5 December 1890. He first studied civil engineering, but switched to art in 1908. After being wounded in World War I, he joined the UFA studio to begin a distinguished career as a writer and director, revealing a fascination for, in his own words, ‘cruelty, fear, horror and death’.
His first film hit was Destiny (Der Müde Tod, 1921), whose influence is evident in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1956) as well as in films by Luis Buñuel, Roger
Corman, Mario Bava and Terry Gilliam. Next was Dr Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) followed by The Nibelungs (1924), which was a local and international
success. Metropolis followed in 1927, then Spies (1928), Woman in the Moon (1929) and M (1931), the psychological thriller regarded as the precursor of film noir. The final film made in his first German sojourn, The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), was banned by Joseph Goebbels, precipitating Lang’s emigration to France – where he made Liliom (1934) – and eventually to the United States, where he stayed for 21 years, becoming a citizen in 1939.Lang directed 21 films in America: films noir, war and crime dramas, and westerns, most notably Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), The Return of Frank James (1940), Man Hunt (1941), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), Clash By Night, Rancho Notorious (1952), The Big Heat and While the City Sleeps (1956). Lang returned to Germany in 1959, but eventually went back to America, where he died on 2 August 1976.

The Original Metropolis Score

GOTTFRIED HUPPERTZ

Born Cologne, 1887
Died Berlin, 1937

Gottfried Huppertz was born in Cologne, Germany on 11 March 1887. He studied music and, during World War I, worked as an opera singer and actor, as well as
writing music for the theatre. In 1920 he moved to Berlin, where he met and became close friends with Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang. This led him into the world of cinema, which became the focus of his career. He had small roles in two Lang films, Four Around a Woman and Dr Mabuse, the Gambler, and was then hired to write the music for The Nibelungs and Metropolis. He also played a small part as a violinist in one of the Yoshiwara nightclub sequences in Metropolis and in Lang’s next film, Spies, for which he also wrote the music. Huppertz’s first sound-film score was for The Judas of Tyrol (1933, directed by Franz Osten). This was followed by Elisabeth and the Fool (1933, Thea von Harbou), The Assumption of Hannele (1934, Thea von Harbou), The Green Domino (1935, Henri Decoin and Herbert Selpin) and Through the Desert (1936, J A Hübler-Kahla). Gottfried Huppertz died of a heart attack on 7 February 1937.

Gottfried Huppertz’s music is an integral part of Metropolis. It was composed in collaboration with Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang, with some sections being written during the shooting. The music perfectly interlocks with the film, creating a complementary (emotional) space for Fritz Lang’s filmic construction.
The score is dominated by Huppertz’s vivid and imaginative leitmotifs, which serve to guide the audience through what can seem to be a convoluted storyline.

Huppertz offers at least one motif for each main character, and each musical motif links the character, stylistically, to either of the two competing classes, in much the same way as the film’s competing visual styles – Expressionist and New Objectivist – are divided between the workers and bosses respectively.
The workers, together with the mad scientist Rotwang and his robot Maria, are accompanied by music that reflects the modernist influences of the day, especially the ‘machine- music’ of composers like Honegger and Schoenberg’s early experiments with tonality. It is, in effect, a stylistic reaction to established order (in this case to the high Romanticism of German music at the end of the 19th century). The music for the ruler Joh Fredersen, his son Freder and the real Maria is, on the other hand, in a decidedly Romantic vein, à la Chopin, Brahms, Zemlinsky and Richard Strauss.
The motifs are mostly very short, and very few are given musical development; they’re usually only repeated, or combined with other motifs as required by the dramatic action.

Synopsis

Political and economic power in Metropolis centres on one person. From the New Tower of Babel, Joh Fredersen reigns over the Upper City and the Lower City. He perceives himself as the ‘brain’; his people mere ‘hands’ in the machinery. Human qualities, however – love, friendship, rebellion, revenge – are still powerful enough to shake the foundations of this futuristic domain’s technological world.
The rich and powerful reside in the Upper City – playing sports in a gigantic stadium, relaxing in the Eternal Gardens. This is the world of Freder, the ruler’s only son. When Maria takes workers’ children on a surprise visit to this paradise, Freder falls in love with her gentle beauty. He decides to see her world, the Lower City, and the subterranean machinery seems to him a Moloch, the sacrifices it demands too costly. Aghast, Freder appeals to his father, to no avail. Rather, Fredersen sets a henchman to shadow his son. In the face of an imminent workers’ uprising, Fredersen consults the inventor Rotwang, his erstwhile rival. Rotwang shows him his secret creation, a robot he has built to replace Hel, Freder’s mother, whom Rotwang had lost to Fredersen.
Fredersen makes a plan: the machine woman is to replace Maria and manipulate the workers. Rotwang pretends to agree, but his real aim is revenge. He wants the fake Maria to destroy the city, and Fredersen’s son. Rotwang kidnaps Maria and transfers her likeness to the machine woman, making her both ruthless agitator and lascivious seductress.
The false Maria begins the cataclysmic workers’ rebellion. The Heart Machine is destroyed and the resulting flood threatens to drown the Lower City. In the  sweeping finale, Freder and the real Maria save the children from drowning. The mob goes after the false Maria and burns her at the stake. Rotwang also dies in the uprising. Fredersen and his foreman Grot seal the reconciliation between the workers and the ruling class with a handshake: ‘The heart must be the mediator between brain and hands.’

Recap Info

Director: Fritz Lang
Screenplay: Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou
Music: Gottfried Huppertz
Starring: Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Brigitte Helm
Country: Germany
Year: 1927 (restored version 2010)
Genre: drama, science fiction
Running time: 153’
Symphonic orchestra: 60/77 musicians
Chamber orchestra: 23/32 musicianshrough the Desert (1936, J A Hübler-Kahla). Gottfried Huppertz died of a heart attack on 7 February 1937.

Ben Hur

Ben-Hur 1925: The Most Expensive Silent Film Ever Made

“There is no such thing as silent film. The music was one half of it”
Lilian Gish – Star of the Silent Era

At almost four million dollars, the 1925 version of Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur is widely considered the most expensive silent movie ever made. Expenses for the movie began in 1919 with the initial negotiations with Henry Wallace and with Abraham Erlanger, producer of the successful stage play. Erlanger eventually
concluded a deal with MGM for generous profit participation and total control over the production. Cost escalation accelerated in 1923 when filming of the movie began in Italy. There were accidents, changes in directors, corporate mergers, and changes in cast, including the hiring of Ramon Navarro as Ben-Hur
replacing George Walsh. Walsh had been hired to play the title role and went to Italy, but he felt he was being treated shabbily and went home in a huff.

As the MGM publicity machine continued its promotion emphasizing the quality of the production, actors wearing heavy costumes who jumped overboard to  escape burning ships during the sea battle had to be rescued from drowning and horses were being maimed and killed with alarming regularity because of the punishing demands placed on them. Even the building of the elaborate sets by Italian craftsmen was delayed by Italy’s new leader, Benito Mussolini. In a  bold move, Irving Thalberg, MGM’s head of production, closed the Italian operation and moved the entire effort to Hollywood to contain costs. This was an early instance where the “business side” of show business significantly curtailed the “show side.” Because of the cost overruns in Italy, for decades after Ben-Hur, most movies were mounted on Hollywood’s back lots so that the business men could keep an eye on the productions and their bottom lines.

Also, sections of the movie boasted an early 2 tone version of Technicolor using red and green filters. While not the first movie to boast color sequences, it was an early use of this technology raising its production value and audience interest. The enormous chariot race arena was constructed at what is now the intersection of La Cienega and San Vicente Boulevards in Los Angeles.
The chariot race sequence was filmed in one day and MGM made the most of it. They made the day of filming a holiday for the studio which gave the day a circus like feel. With the exception of the leading men, Ramon Navarro and Francis X. Bushman, the other titled characters from the movie are today largely unknown. However, because of the holiday, established stars such as John and Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert, Dorothy and Lillian Gish, Harold Lloyd, and even America’s sweetheart—Mary Pickford made special appearances in the crowd scenes. While they weren’t 14 matinee idols, Samuel Goldwyn and Sid Grauman (of the Chinese Theater) also showed up on screen rooting for Ben-Hur. Although the movie made over nine million dollars in its original run, it was not considered to have made any money for the studio because of the production and promotion costs and because of the deal struck by Mr. Erlanger. In subsequent releases it continued to make money for the studio, but more importantly, it cemented MGM’s reputation as the quality studio in Hollywood. This reputation helped Thalberg and his associates leverage other successful projects and for the next three decades allowed MGM to attract more stars than there were in the heavens.

Reception

The studio's publicity department was relentless in promoting the film, advertising it with lines like: "The Picture Every Christian Ought to See!" and  The Supreme Motion Picture Masterpiece of All Time". Although audiences flocked to Ben-Hur after its premiere in 1925 and the picture grossed $9 million worldwide, its huge expenses and the deal with Erlanger made it a net financial loss for MGM. It recorded an overall loss of $698,000. In terms of publicity and prestige however, it was a great success.

Note: the color sequences were removed from the 1925 film and replaced with black and white footage when it was re-released. These Technicolor scenes were considered lost until the 1980s when Turner Entertainment (who by then had acquired the rights to the film) found the crucial sequences in a Czech film archive. (The restoration of the 1925 film by Turner Broadcasting includes these color sequences). The film was re-released in 1931 with an added musical score, by the original composers William Axt and David Mendoza, and sound effects.

1987 New Restoration

In 1987, film historians Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, working in conjunction with the Czechoslovakian Film Archive and Turner Entertainment Company, produced the 35mm restoration of Ben-Hur, complete with the original color tints and two-strip Technicolor sequences. Brownlow writes, “It was a great privilege to be able to work on Ben-Hur. Turner had taken good care of their dupe-negative, but the Technicolor sequences had faded to a muddy brown … so we made enquiries and discovered that the Czech Film Archive had all eleven Technicolor sequences in one complete, uncut roll. A shot censored at the time,
Christ’s hand on the cross, came from a private collector in Germany. By following the cutting continuity — or post-production script — we were able to restore all the tints to the film, which had been preserved in black and white.” In addition, a new score was commissioned from Carl Davis for a 1989 Thames Television screening of the film. 

Synopsis

Ben-Hur is a wealthy Jew and boyhood friend of the powerful Roman Tribune, Messala. When an accident leads to Ben-Hur's arrest, Messala, who has become corrupt and arrogant, makes sure Ben-Hur and his family are jailed and separated. Ben-Hur is sentenced to slave labor in a Roman war galley. Along the way, he unknowingly encounters Jesus, the carpenter's son who offers him water. Once aboard ship, his attitude of defiance and strength impresses a Roman admiral, Quintus Arrius, who allows him to remain unchained. This actually works in the Admiral's favor because when his ship is attacked and sunk by pirates, Ben-Hur saves him from drowning. Arrius then treats Ben-Hur as a son, and over the years the young man grows strong and becomes a victorious chariot racer. This eventually leads to a climactic showdown with Messala in a chariot race, in which Ben-Hur is the victor. However, Messala does not die, as he does in the more famous 1959 remake of the film. Ben-Hur is eventually reunited with his mother and sister, who are suffering from leprosy but are miraculously cured by Jesus.

Ben-Hur, The New 2016 Remake

MGM and Paramount Pictures have finally announced that they have begun filming Ben-Hur, the muchawaited remake of William Wyler’s classic. Direction has been entrusted to the Russian Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted and The Legend of Vampire Hunter), who has at his disposal a huge budget; Mark Burnett and
Roma Downey are executive producers. The film, according to the official outline, will go back to the origins of Lew Wallace’s epic novel, with a focus on Faith, telling the story of a wrongly accused nobleman who survives through years of slavery in order to avenge himself on his best friend, guilty of betraying him. Revenge or forgiveness? That is the decision that both men will have to face at the end. Jack Huston, as Ben-Hur, is the unquestionable protagonist; as his antagonist, Morgan Freeman is Ilderim; Toby Kebbell portrays Massala, and Nazanin Boniadi Esther. The cast also includes Rodrigo Santoro as Jesus
Christ; Pilou Asbæk as Pontius Pilate; Sofia Black D'Elia, Ayelet Zurer and Moises Arias. Oliver Wood is Director of Photography (The Bourne Identity); Naomi Shohan is Production Designer; and Varvava Avdyusko Costume Designer. Filming began in Matera, European Capital of Culture in 2019, then moved to
Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. The movie is scheduled to be released on 26th February 2016.
 

A Movie That Will Live Forever

This remake is only the last version of a story that, over the years, has been portrayed several times, from the first English short film, to the cinema and television renderings. Following is a list of its adaptations, which clearly shows its everlasting appeal, always confirmed by ample critical and public success:

• 1907 Ben-Hur, short film – England
• 1925 Ben-Hur – A Tale of the Christ
• 1959 Ben-Hur, US movie directed by William Wyler, starring Charlton Heston
• 2003 Ben-Hur animation film by Bill Kowalchuk
• 2010 Ben-Hur television miniseries in 2 parts by Joseph Morgan
• 2016 Ben-Hur directed by Timur Bekmamb

 

Carl Davis’s New Soundtrack

Carl Davis embarked on his third such score in 1987 (the first two were Napoléan and Intolerance).
Ben-Hur offered a different challenge in that the story is truly Biblical, requiring an element of religious spirituality. Davis hit on the brilliant idea to incorporate the ‘Dresden Amen’, famously quoted by Mendelssohn and Wagner, for those moments in the film where purely religious figures are depicted. Otherwise the music is new so as to fit the drama of the story.
Davis does a wonderful job in capturing the feelings inherent in each scene; tenderness, exoticism, fury, excitement, grandeur. The film itself has all these requirements to fulfil.
In many ways the score to Ben-Hur is as strong and resplendent as the movie itself. Written for a large orchestra, it is fun to spot the influences that
permeate Davis’s music. There are too many to list but the integrity of the score shines forth.
The ghost of Richard Strauss hovers over the entire score, especially in the harmonic language and orchestrations. As such, the music has an early century late Romanticism that still feels contemporary yet never seems out of place alongside the 60-yearold images it was written for. Ben-Hur and Esther’s love theme is voiced in a tender violin and cello duet. The slinky music for Iras the Egyptian has a sultry, Salome bent, in which the Straussian orchestrations ooze desert and sexual heat.
For the 1959 remake, director William Wyler filmed the famous chariot race nearly shot-for-shot from the 1925 original.
However, the scene plays without music, focusing instead on the cheers of the spectators and the sounds of the race itself.
Davis’s cue for the silent film version is a 10-minute orchestral tour de force that captures all the excitement of this legendary scene. Heroic trumpet
statements of Ben-Hur’s theme battle with the lower brass of Messala, while dueling forces in the double sets of timpanis underscore the rousing race theme.

Carl Davis

Since moving to England in the 1960s, American-born conductor/composer Carl Davis has been a leading figure in both the concert hall and in film music, carving out a unique niche in each. Born in New York City, Davis attended Bard College and later studied composition with Paul Nordoff, Hugo Kauder, and Per Nørgård. He served as a conductor with the New York City Opera and the Robert Shaw Chorale, and earned an award for his 1959 off-Broadway revue Diversions (written in collaboration with Steven Vinaver). He became active in England at the outset of the 1960s with the Edinburgh Festival (where Diversions was performed in 1961), and this led to his being commissioned by producer Ned Sherrin to compose the score for the satiric television series That Was the Week That Was. The success of his work on at series led to further work on British television and, later, commissions from the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. Davis first began gaining international recognition in 1973, when he was engaged to write the score for Thames Television's landmark 26-hour documentary series The World at War, which was an immediate hit in the United States and was widely shown for decades after -- his grim, often irony-laced scoring was among the most haunting ever heard in a television series.
As a film composer, Carl Davis has worked on notable contemporary movies, most notably The French Lieutenant's Woman, which won him a British Academy Award and an Ivor Novello Award. His most unusual film work, however, has been in the authorship of new scores for such renowned silent films as the European restoration of Abel Gance's Napoleon , and The Thief of Bagdad. Davis has scored more than 50 silent films, earning him the sobriquet "Mr. Silent Movie," and by 2005 Davis had scored all 12 of Charlie Chaplin's Mutual films, key early Chaplin shorts that Chaplin had not scored himself. Davis' score for
Napoleon earned him the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture in 1983, and he had the privilege of returning to Napoleon when a new five-and-a-half hour long restoration was unveiled in 2005. The US premiere of the restored version was scheduled for 2012, with Davis conducting the Oakland East Bay Symphony.
Since the 1970s, Carl Davis has been an active recording artist, principally as a conductor, most notably for EMI with a collection of film music by Sir William Walton and on the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's own imprint with a compilation of his own film music. In 1991, Davis assisted Paul McCartney in the composition of his Liverpool Oratorio, and subsequently Davis led the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic's Summer Pops Concert series from 1993 to 2001. Davis has also written concert works, including a symphony, a clarinet concerto; a fantasy for flute, strings, and harpsichord; and a programmatic work entitled A Circle of Stones. Ballet is a form in which Davis is particularly productive, and his ballets include A Christmas Carol, A Simple Man, Alice in Wonderland, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Davis' ballet of Cyrano de Bergerac appeared in the spring of 2007, followed by The Lady of the Camellias in 2008. Though American born, in 2006 Davis was awarded an honorary CBE from the British government for his contributions to music.

The making-of:Fred Niblo on the set of Ben-Hur

Recap Info

Director: Charles Brabin, Fred Niblo
Screenplay: June Mathis, CareyWilson, Bess Meredyth, Katharine Hilliker
Based on: “Ben-Hur”: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace
Starring: Ramon Novarro, Francis X. Bushman, May McAvoy, Betty Bronson
Genre: Biblical Drama
Country: US (New York)
Distributed by: Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Year: 1925 (restored version 1987)
Music: Carl Davis (1987)
Running time: 141’
Orchestra: 70/80 musicians

Battleship Potëmkin

Battleship Potëmkin: the greatest film of all time

Considered one of the most important films in the history of silent movie, as well as possibly Eisenstein’s greatest work, BATTLESHIP POTËMKIN brought Eisenstein’s theories of cinema art to the world in a powerful showcase; his emphasis on montage, his stress of intellectual contact, and his treatment of the mass instead of the individual as the protagonist. Eisenstein used his innovative form of montage to celebrate mass action and collective heroism.

Shot on location, entirely with nonactors, POTËMKIN was designed to look like a newsreel and function as a drama—if “drama” is the word to describe the hysteria of the  movie’s key scene, a massacre set on the steps leading down to Odessa harbor. Actually, the "Odessa steps" sequence is arguably the single most famous and widely quoted passage in the history of film.
The power and violence of editing has never been better demonstrated than by this space-pulverizing, timedistending, emotionally alarming barrage of two-second shots, half of them close-ups. Widely regarded as a masterpiece of international cinema, BATTLESHIP POTËMKIN, was named the greatest film of all time at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958.

The film structure

Potemkin belongs to the category of epic films and for the first time in cinema it represents the mass as a hero as opposed to the individual. The film is based on a real episode of the revolution which occurred in Odessa in 1905, although the Odessa steps scene was created to enhance the dramatic cli-max. The director describes the structure of the film as events divided into five acts conforming to the requirements of classical tragedy:

• “Men and Maggots"
• "Drama on the Deck"
• "A Dead Man Calls for Justice"
• "The Odessa Steps"
• "One against all"

Plot summary

On board the battleship POTËMKIN, conditions on the ship are unbearable, which incites revolution among the sailors, most notably within the character of Vakulinchik. After the ship's doctor declares rancid meat safe to eat, there is unrest and executions are ordered. Vakulinchik then implores his shipmates to rise up against the officers of the ship. All the officers are killed and the ship is liberated.
During the uprising, Vakulinchik dies. His body his placed on the docks in the Odessa harbour as a symbol of the revolution. The citizens of Odessa rally around his body and join the Potemkin in their revolt. Cossacks then arrive and slaughter the helpless citizens on the steps leading to the harbour, effectively ending the revolt in Odessa. A fleet of battleships then comes to destroy the Potemkin but the sailors unite and allow the ship to pass unharmed.

The film and its context

The Soviets were inordinately fond of jubilees, so it was only fitting that for his second feature film Sergei Eisenstein would be commissioned to direct a multi-episode series marking the twentieth anniversary of the 1905 revolution in Russia. The first episode was originally intended to focus mainly on the strike that took place in St. Petersburg in October 1905, with the June 1905 mutiny aboard the battleship POTËMKIN to serve as a prologue. However, bad weather and logistical difficulties compelled Eisenstein and his crew to relocate to Odessa, and the POTËMKIN mutiny expanded into a full-fledged feature in its own right.

While Eisenstein's debut feature Strike (1924) still dazzles through its sheer stylistic daring, in THE BATTLESHIP POTËMKIN he consolidated his skills as a total filmmaker, demonstrating greater control over narrative structure and pacing.
While Eisenstein was always interested more in creating an effective and well-constructed film than in being literally faithful to the historical record, many of the key images in the script were in fact inspired by actual events associated with the Potëmkin mutiny: the sailors' refusal to eat borsch made from maggot-infested meat; the revolutionary activists Matyshenko and Vakulenchuk (spelled Vakulinchuk in the film) using that incident as a pretext to incite the other sailors to mutiny; the arrival of the battleship into the Odessa port with a red flag; the throngs of townspeople lining up to view Vakulenchuk's corpse; and the POTËMKIN being greeted by cheering sailors on another ship. There was even a massacre of civilians by police on the famed steps leading down to Odessa's port, though that was just one part of the civil strikes that occurred throughout the city and the resulting crackdown by the police and Cossacks. It should be noted that Eisenstein didn't include at least one very significant event: the massive fire that devastated the Odessa port during the strike and claimed many lives.

In addition to its innovative and much-analyzed photography and editing, the film was noteworthy for its unusual mix of professional and non-professional actors, based on the principle of typage or casting primarily according to physical types. Eisenstein's assistant Grigori Aleksandrov played Gilyarovsky. The role of Vakulenchuk was filled by Aleksandr Antonov, a member of the Proletkult theater troupe in which Eisenstein had worked before moving into cinema. The film director Vladimir Barsky, an important figure in early Soviet cinema, played the role of Captain Golikov. Eisenstein also challenged the norms of commercial cinema by not relying on a single protagonist or romantic coupling to shape the narrative, emphasizing the notion of a "mass protagonist" instead.
THE BATTLESHIP POTËMKIN premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in December 1925 and was released in Moscow in January 1926. Barely completed in time for the premiere, it was initially more of a rough cut, as Richard Taylor has pointed out. The orchestral accompaniment, as was common practice at the time, was culled from pre-existing works in the classical repertoire. At its two main Moscow engagements, the theater exteriors were decorated to resemble battleships, and the staff were dressed in sailors' outfits. Posters touted it as "the pride of Soviet cinema," boasting of 300,000 admissions in the first three weeks alone.

Potëmkin in Berlin

What really sealed the film's success, however, was the sensational reception at its April 1926 Berlin premiere. The Soviet authorities actually sold the original negative to the Germans--a move that seems inconceivable today--but they retained the right to request new prints from it. Fearing a threat to "the public order," the German censors initially banned the film outright but later demanded a number of cuts, mainly due to violent imagery. These included some of the shots depicting the body of young boy trampled on the Odessa steps. The film director Piel Jutzi was brought in to adapt the film for German audiences; among other things, he divided it into six parts instead of five.

Naum Kleiman, the foremost Eisenstein scholar, has speculated that Eisenstein's trip to Germany before the premiere was in fact to oversee the film's reediting, so he may well have had some input into the German distribution version. The director also guided Edmund Meisel's work on the music score, encouraging him to emphasize rhythm over melody. For instance, the music accompanying the battleship's climactic meeting with the squadron has a mechanical quality that underscores the film's ties with the Soviet artistic movement known as Constructivism.

Ultimately, cultural impact of THE BATTLESHIP POTËMKIN in Germany cannot be overstated. Besides becoming a great popular success, it influenced artistic figures as ranging from Fritz Lang to Bertolt Brecht and the theater directors Erwin Piscator and Max Reinhardt. Not only did the film's reputation in Germany help raise awareness of it in countries such as England and the United States, it even resulted in a second release of the film in the Soviet Union during the
summer of 1926. However, the Soviet authorities' decision to sell the negative to the Germans meant it would not survive in its original version.

Political implications

The film's potential to influence political thought through emotional response was noted by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who called POTËMKIN "a marvelous film without equal in the cinema ... anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film". The film was not banned in Nazi Germany, although Himmler issued a directive prohibiting SS members from attending screenings, as he deemed the movie inappropriate for the troops.

The film was eventually banned in some countries, including being banned at various times in both the United States and France, as well as in its native Soviet Union. The film was banned in the United Kingdom longer than any other film in British history.

Restorations

The pressures of censorship and the vagaries of distribution over the years have resulted in the situation that THE BATTLESHIP POTËMKIN survives in several different versions, each with their own set of limitations. For many years the Museum of Modern Art circulated an English language version based on an authoritative print donated by the Eisenstein scholar Jay Leyda and supposedly provided by Eisenstein himself, but they altered the original intertitles, among other things making them longer and thus
slowing the pace of the film. Another version with English titles was prepared by the British leftist filmmaker Ivor Montagu. In 1950, the film was reissued in the Soviet Union in a version supervised by Grigori Aleksandrov and accompanied by a serviceable, if pedestrian, score by Nikolai Kryukov. According to Enno Patalas, this version was missing some seventy shots, suffered from substantially reworked intertitles, and even reordered some of the footage following earlier, similarly corrupted versions.
For example, the visceral impact of the opening of the Odessa steps massacre--in which the title "And suddenly..." is followed by a series of jump cuts of a woman's head jerking back--was blunted by preceding it with shots of the soldiers' boots and rifles to provide more of a conventional causeand-effect structure. This version also used step-printing (the repetition of individual frames) to slow the movement down for projection at sound speed. In 1976, the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Yutkevitch, in collaboration with Naum Kleiman, created a new version that was the most complete and authentic to date, but its pacing was again compromised by the use of stretch printing, and it was still missing fifteen shots compared to the current reconstruction. Thus, while it contained fewer shots, at 74 minutes it still ran significantly longer than the 2005 reconstruction. Also, one could argue that the excerpts from the Shostakovich symphonies chosen to accompany the print added to its lugubrious atmosphere.

New 2005 reconstruction

The 2005 reconstruction relies heavily on the Jay Leyda print and written recollections for its shot list, but whenever possible uses early generation prints held at the British Film Institute because of their superior photographic quality. (The original negative still exists at Gosfilmofond of Russia, though it bears the traces of German censorship and according to the archive is too fragile to use for printing, as Patalas related in a 2005 article in the Journal of Film Preservation.) The intertitles
recreate the original text as closely as possible, including the restoration of a Trotsky quotation as the epigraph; predictably, it had been replaced by a Lenin quote when Trotsky fell out of favor. The length of the individual title cards is also now more in keeping with the film's rhythm as a whole, which is no small point since Eisenstein viewed them as a crucial component of his montage aesthetic. Lastly, as Eisenstein intended from the start, this version uses hand-coloring to tint the Potemkin's flag red during certain sequences.

Naum Kleiman, one of the collaborators to the project, sums up the difficult choices faced in reconstructing the film: "There being no absolutely exact film record from 1926, we cannot claim to have all the scenes in their full length. Often, what Patalas did was an extension of an already existing version, that is, of the censored version. Due to the disintegration of the film, or splices that have come apart, some parts had to be spliced together again. Some frames were lost in the process. Today it's difficult to assess whether all that was added to the very last version changed the meaning of the film, or its rhythm, or whether it reinforced its visual quality. At any rate, we felt that we managed to approximate the original up to 99%, or even 99.5%."

Viewers already familiar with THE BATTLESHIP POTËMKIN are likely to be struck with how much better the reconstruction flows as a film compared to previous versions. Combined with the superior detail and contrast of the new video transfer and the excitement of Meisel's orchestral score, the reconstruction enables us to appreciate one of cinema's greatest masterpieces in a fresh light.

Soundtracks

To retain its relevance as a propaganda film for each new generation, Eisenstein thought that the score should have been rewritten every 20 years. The original score was  composed by Edmund Meisel. A salon orchestra performed the Berlin premiere in 1926. The instruments were flute/piccolo, trumpet, trombone, harmonium, percussion and strings without viola. Meisel wrote the score in twelve days because of the late approval of film censors.
Nikolai Kryukov composed a new score in 1950 for the 25th anniversary. In 1985, Chris Jarrett composed a solo piano accompaniment for the movie. In 1986 Eric Allaman wrote an electronic score for a showing that took place at the 1986 Berlin International Film Festival. The music was commissioned by the organizers, who wanted to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the film's German premiere. The score was played only at this premiere and has not been released on CD or DVD. Contemporary reviews were largely positive apart from negative comment because the music was electronic. Allaman also wrote an opera about Battleship Potëmkin, which is musically separate from the film score.
In its commercial format, on DVD for example, the film is usually accompanied by classical music added for the 50th anniversary edition re-released in 1975. Three symphonies from Dmitri Shostakovich have been used, with No. 5 beginning and ending the film, being the most prominent. In 2007, Del Rey & The Sun Kings also recorded this soundtrack. In an attempt to make the film relevant to the 21st century, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe (of the Pet Shop Boys) composed a soundtrack in 2004 with the Dresden Symphonic Orchestra. Their soundtrack, released in 2005 as Battleship Potëmkin, premiered in September 2004 at an open-air concert in Trafalgar Square, London. The avant-garde jazz ensemble Club Foot Orchestra has also re-scored the film, and performed live accompanying the film.

For the 2005 restoration of the film, the Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum fur Film und Fernsehen, commissioned a re-recording of the 1926 Edmund Meisel’s original soundtrack. Meisel’s orchestral score was lost for many years, so it was finally  reconstructed. Helmut Imig was given the task of making a new adaptation and instrumentation using other source materials, including the official piano reduction of the music.

The original soundtrack by Edmund Meisel

Edmund Meisel (1894 -1930) is almost unknown and neglected composer. His relationship with Eisenstein goes beyond the pure artistic collaboration to a shared political ideology. He started his career as a composer collaborating in po-litical theatre. He engaged contacts with the Communist International of help to the worker.

He was a sort of shooting star not only because of his premature death but also because of his tempestuos musical con-tribution to the Theatre and Films. He could be related to the Italian Futurism movement; he invented a noise machine, a sort of keyboard that reproduced all sort of sounds, the Geräuschmaschine, and gave concerts playing it in orchestras. Later on the used it in films like Potemkin to create wind and ship engines noise. The ‘noise-music’ is decisive to understand his music conception in POTËMKIN. The reason is that he was trying to reach musical drama by looking for the rhythm and sound of nature. The most important step in his career was Potëmkin and his contact with Eisenstein. Their relationship was very short but it was a fruitful mutual exchange. As Ian Christie wrote: “Meisel broke decisively the pot-pourri tradition of film music and launched boldly into a musical architecture that responded to the challenge of Eisenstein’s non-narrative mon-tage construction”.

He wrote both scores for POTËMKIN in a very short time. He had only 12 days and nights to compose the whole score for Potemkin including rehearsals for the POTËMKIN’s Berlin performance. Ernest Boreman wrote in 1934 an article in Sight and Sound about Meisel’s method of composing. “Meisel analyzed the montage of some famous silent films in regard to rhythm, emphasis, emotional climax and mood. To reach separate shot he assigned a certain musical theme. Then he directly combined the separate themes using the rhythm, emphasis and climaxes of the visual montage for the organization of his music. He wished to prove theexperiments that the montage of a good film is based on the same rules and develops in the same way as mu- sic. The result of this experiment was the some so-called ‘good’ films did not in any way produced music but merely a chaos of various themes unordered and unorganized. other of the films he chose, however, resulted in a kind of strange rhapsody unaccustomed and extraordinary to the ear but nevertheless not without a certain musical continuity. By far the best result was Potemkin”.

In conclusion, on the rousing score by Meisel we can say that:

• there is a perfect symbiosis of visual and musical images closer to the model of sound film rather than music used as simple illustration;
• it is sensitive to the internal dramatic structure of the film and in particular to the rhythmic montage;
• well balance mixture of tonal and modernist musical language corresponding to different moods;
• the noise is part of the music and incorporated into the score as an expressive device. Consequently,there is a marked presence of percussion instruments from the gong to the timpani, sometimes trying toreplace non existing diegetic sound;
• flexibility in the rhythmic pulse, form continuity (ostinato with martial connotations) to discontinuity (longnotes with spare silences). Overall rhythmic power;
• a thematic unity without long developments; instead we find short themes in closed intervalic relationship,giving a sense of continuity. Special attention to the tritone and chromatism;
• spare music acts as an external commentator to certain characters and their implications, with a specialsense of humour and irony with influences of popular music, jazz, cabaret and music hall. Political (the captain) who represents the oppressive power. Religious (the priest) as the composer expresses by acomic tune, his marxists ideology, and finally Institutional (the doctor) who represents doctrinal dictator-ship.

The Odessa Steps sequence

One of the most celebrated scenes in the film is the massacre of civilians on the Odessa Steps (also known as the Primorsky or POTËMKIN Stairs). This scene has been described as one of the most influential in the history of cinema, because it introduced concepts of film editing and montage to cinema. In this scene, the Tsar's soldiers in their white summer tunics march down a seemingly endless flight of steps in a rhythmic, machine-like fashion, firing volleys into a crowd.

A separate detachment of mounted Cossacks charges the crowd at the bottom of the stairs. The victims include an older woman wearing pince-nez, a young boy with his mother, a student in uniform and a teenage schoolgirl. A mother pushing an infant in a baby carriage falls to the ground dying and the carriage rolls down the steps amidst the fleeing crowd.

The massacre on the steps, which never took place, was presumably inserted by Eisenstein for dramatic effect and to demonise the Imperial government. It is, however, based on the fact that there were widespread demonstrations in the area, sparked off by the arrival of the POTËMKIN in Odessa Harbour, and both The Times and the resident British Consul reported that troops fired on the crowds; deaths were allegedly in the hundreds.

Orlando Figes writes: “[Eisenstein] also used montage to extend time and increase the tension – as in THE BATTLESHIP POTËMKIN, in the famous massacre scene on the steps of Odessa in which the action is slowed down by the intercutting of close-ups of faces in the crowd with repeated images of the soldiers’ descent down the stairs. The scene, by the way, was entirely fictional: there was no massacre on the Odessa steps in 1905 – although it often appears in the history books.”
– Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Metropolitan Books, 2002)

Eisenstein, father of montage

According to Columbia Electronic Encyklopedia: Montage (montäzh', Fr. môNtäzh'), the art and technique of motion-picture editing in which contrasting shots or sequences are used to effect emotional or intellectual responses. It was developed creatively after 1925 by the Russian Sergei Eisenstein; since that time montage has become an increasingly complex and inventive way of extending the imaginative possibilities of film art. In still photography a composite picture, made by combining several prints, or parts of prints, and then rephotographing them as a whole, is often called a montage or a photomontage.

“Eisenstein saw film editing, or montage, as a process which operated according to the Marxist dialectic. This dialectic is a way of looking at human history and experience as a perpetual conflict in which a force (thesis) collides with a counterforce (antithesis) to produce from their collision a wholly new phenomenon (synthesis), which is not the sum of the two forces but something greater than and different from them both…Eisenstein defined montage as a series of ideas or impressions which arise from “the collision of independent shots”…Just as the individual words in a sentence
depend for their meaning upon the words which surround them, so the individual shots in a montage sequence acquire meaning from their interaction with the other shots in the sequence.”
ꟷ David Cook, A History of Narrative Film, W.W. Norton & Co., 1996

"Montage, has been established by Soviet film as the nerve of cinema. To determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema."
ꟷ Sergei Eisenstein, "A Dialectic Approach”

“Eisenstein has become a myth. He has been acclaimed as a genius, as the greatest film-maker of all times, as the maker of the greatest film of all time, and as one of the great philosophers of art of our century. More has been written about him than about any other film director and he himself wrote more than any other film director both about his own work and about cinema as a medium and as an art form.”
ꟷ Richard Taylor, The Eisenstein Reader, 2009

Today contemporary directors are still using his methods of montage. Brian de Palma used the motive of rolling down pram in the train station sequence in his movie The  Untouchables (1987). Oliver Stone used Eisenstein's concepts of visual conflict in the sequence of night attack in Platoon (1986). Majority of music video clips are using Eisenstein's montage of attraction. TV commercials are based on intellectual montage, or like Nike and Adidas advertisement are using overtonal montage.

Critical reaction

BATTLESHIP POTËMKIN has received universal acclaim from critics. On review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an overall 100% "Certified Fresh" approval rating based on 44 reviews, with a rating average of 9.1 out of 10. The site's consensus reads, "A technical masterpiece, Battleship Potëmkin is Soviet cinema at its finest, and its montage editing techniques remain influential to this day." Since its release, Battleship Potëmkin has often been cited as one of the finest propaganda films ever made and considered amongst the greatest films of all time.

Similarly, in 1952, Sight & Sound magazine cited The Battleship Potëmkin as the fourth greatest film of all time and has been voted within the top ten in the magazine's five subsequent decennial polls, dropping to number 11 in the 2012 poll.
In 2007, a two-disc, restored version of the film was released on DVD. Time magazine's Richard Corliss named it one of the Top 10 DVDs of the year, ranking it at #5. It ranked #3 in Empire's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010. In April 2011, BATTLESHIP POTËMKIN was re-released in UK cinemas, distributed by the British Film Institute. On its re-release, Total Film magazine gave the film a five-star review, stating: "...nearly 90 years on, Eisenstein’s masterpiece is still guaranteed to get the pulse racing."

Treatment in other works of art

The scene is perhaps the best example of Eisenstein's theory on montage, and many films pay homage to the scene, including Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, Tibor Takacs' Deathline, Laurel and Hardy's The Music Box, Chandrashekhar Narvekar's Hindi film Tezaab, Shukō Murase's anime Ergo Proxy, and The Magic Christian. Several films spoof it, including Woody Allen's Bananas and Love and Death, Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker's Naked Gun 33⅓.The Final Insult (though actually a parody of The Untouchables), and the Soviet-Polish comedy Deja Vu, Jacob Tierney's The Trotsky. The 2011 November 7 Parade in Moscow also features a homage to the film.

The painter Francis Bacon called this
The Battleship Potëmkin image a catalyst for his work.

The painter Francis Bacon (1909–1992) was profoundly influenced by Eisenstein's images, particularly the Odessa Steps shot of the nurse's broken glasses and open mouthed  scream. The open mouth image appeared first in his Abstraction from the Human Form, in Fragment of a Crucifixion, and other works including his famous Head series.

The Russian-born photographer and artist Alexey Titarenko paid tribute to the Odessa Steps shot in his series "City Of Shadows" (1991–1993) by using a crowd of desperate people on the stairs near the subway station in Saint Petersburg to demonize the Soviet government and as a symbol of human tragedy.

 

Alexey Titarenko paid tribute to the Odessa Steps shot in his series "City Of Shadows". Saint Petersburg, 1991.

 

Recap Info

Director: Sergei Eisenstein
Written by: Nikolai Aseyev, Sergei Tretyakov, Sergei Eisenstein on an idea by Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko
Music: Edmund Meisel (original reorchestrated soundtrack)
Starring: Aleksandr Antonov, Vladimir Barksy, Grigori Aleksandrov, Vladimir Heifetz
Country: Soviet Union
Year: 1925
Genre: Epic
Running time: 70’
Symphonic orchestra: 51/61 musicians

Prince Achmed

The first full-lenght animation movie in the history of cinema

The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a title that may not say much to most people. Some mightremember that Prince Achmed is one of the many characters that populate “The Arabian Nights”, but few know that he is featured in a film where he is not just a character among many but the protagonist: Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed is not only the first animation movie but also and above all one of the most extraordinary examples of its genre; with its 300.000 frames it took more than three long years for this Lotte Reiniger’s creation to be assembled. 
In this work of art, music is an integral and consubstantial part, one of the most beautiful and truest examples of “silent movie sound track”. 
The result is a small theatre of paper marionettes, the complex movements and metamorphoses of which conjure up a symbolic and mysterious Orient. 
This film today has been recognized as a very important turning point in the history of cinema.

“Concerto for solo silhouette”

In 1923 the German artist Lotte Reiniger (Berlin, 1899–1981) was granted consistent funds for the realization of a full-length silhouette movie. The backer of this venture was a young Berlin banker, Luis Hagen, who had seen and been impressed by her earlier works. When, in 1923, inflation struck the German mark, Hagen converted some of his money into film stocks, which he then offered to Reiniger for a feature film of her choice, organizing for her a studio on top of the garage of his Potsdam home.

Reiniger described the studio and the equipment the team used to make The Adventures of Prince Achmed:

“The studio was very low, being an attic under the roof, so the shooting field with its glass plate had to be very near the floor in order to get the camera up high enough in a suitable distance, with just enough space to place the lamps underneath. I had to kneel on the seat of an old dismantled motorcar to execute my manipulation. I liked this very much; it was a much more comfortable position for me than sitting on a swivel chair as I
had to do later on. The whole contraption looked like a four-poster bed, the camera being supported by sturdy wooden beams, on which we could fix and take off to our heart’s content every construction we might need for our special effects.”

The artists set up their studio in the garage attic overlooking a vegetable garden, a small space without enough room to stand up straight and work at the same time.

Their multi-plane animation table design revolutionized two-dimensional animation.

And so, between 1923 and 1926, with the help of her husband Carl Kock, of Walter Tuerck, Alexander Kardan and Walter Ruttmann (for the settings), Lotte Reiniger accomplished what is considered her masterpiece: The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a silent, black-and-white animation movie recreating the atmosphere of Arabian Nights. 

The film, which cost her authoress as many as three years of hard work, tells, in an altogether new way, the vicissitudes of the protagonist against witches and sorcerers, in the quest for his fair princess. 
This is a very unusual type of animation, compared to what we are used to, for it is not made of illustrated images seen in rapid succession but employs a particular technique invented by Lotte Reiniger who, inspired by shadow play, used card silhouettes, instead of drawings. 
The Japanese already had a history of using shadow play for entertainment in the form of shadow puppet theatres. With Reiniger’s films having traveled to Japan, it is hard to deny her influence on the Japanese silhouette animation films such as Toshio Suzuki’s Yonjunin no Tozoku (Forty Burglars, 1928).

Synopsis

The story is based on the elements taken from the collection 1001 Arabian Nights, specifically The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou featured in Andrew Lang's The Blue Fairy Book. The movie is divided into five acts, each with a title. There are three settings: the city of the Caliph, the magic islands of Waq Waq, and China. 

An African sorcerer conjures up a flying horse, which he shows to the Caliph. When the sorcerer refuses to sell it for any amount of gold, the Caliph offers any treasure he has. The sorcerer chooses Dinarsade, the Caliph's daughter, to her great distress. Prince Achmed, Dinarsade's brother, objects, but the sorcerer persuades him to try out the horse. It carries the prince away, higher and higher into the sky, as he does not know how to control it. The Caliph has the sorcerer imprisoned.

When Achmed discovers how to make the horse descend, he finds himself in a strange foreign land. He is greeted by a bevy of attractive maidens. When they begin fighting for his attention, he flies away to a lake. There, he watches as Pari Banu, the beautiful ruler of the land of Wak Wak, arrives with her attendants to bathe. When they spot him, they all fly away, except for Peri Banu, for Achmed has her magical flying feather costume. She flees on foot, but he captures her. He gains her trust when he returns her feathers. They fall in love. She warns him, however, that the demons of Wak Wak will try to kill him. 

The sorcerer frees himself from his chains. Transforming himself into a bat, he seeks out Achmed. The prince chases the sorcerer (back in human form) and falls into a pit. While Achmed fights a giant snake, the sorcerer takes Pari Banu to China and sells her to the Emperor. The sorcerer returns and pins Achmed under a boulder on top of a mountain. However, the Witch (die Hexe) of the Flaming Mountain notices him and rescues Achmed. The sorcerer is her archenemy, so she helps Achmed rescue Pari Banu from the Emperor. 
Then the demons of Wak Wak find the couple and, despite Achmed's fierce resistance, carry Pari Banu off. Achmed forces a captive demon to fly him to Wak Wak. However, the gates of Wak Wak are locked. He then slays a monster attacking Aladdin. 

Aladdin tells of how he, a poor tailor, was recruited by the sorcerer to retrieve a magic lamp from a cave. When Aladdin returned to the cave entrance, the sorcerer demanded the lamp before letting him out. Aladdin refused, so the sorcerer sealed him in. Aladdin accidentally released one of the genies of the lamp and ordered it to take him home. He then courted and married Dinarsade. One night, Dinarsade, Aladdin's  magnificent palace and the lamp disappeared. Blamed by the Caliph, Aladdin fled to avoid being executed. A storm at sea cast him ashore at Wak Wak. When he tried to pluck fruit from a "tree", it turned into a monster and grabbed him, but Achmed killed it. 

Then the witch arrives. Since only the lamp can open the gates, she agrees to attack the sorcerer to get it. They engage in a magical duel, each transforming into various creatures. After a while, they resume their human forms and fling fireballs at each other. Finally, the witch slays the sorcerer. With the lamp, they are able to enter Wak Wak, just in time to save Pari Banu from being thrown to her death. A fierce battle erupts. A demon steals the lamp, but the witch gets it back. She summons creatures from the lamp who defeat the demons. One hydra-like creature seizes Pari Banu. When Achmed cuts off one of its heads, two more grow back immediately, but the witch stops this regeneration, allowing Achmed to kill it. A flying palace then settles to the ground. Inside, Aladdin finds Dinarsade. The two couples bid goodbye to the witch and fly home in the palace.
 

Recap Info

Director: Lotte Reininger
Screenplay: Lotte Reininger (from “The Arabian Nights”)
Production: Comenius-Film GmbH
Music: Wolfgang Zeller
Country: Germany
Itertitles: German
Year: 1926
Orchestra: 25/38 players
Duration: 66’

Film overview

MOVIES IN CONCERT

Film music performed with live film
Gioele Muglialdo, conductor

Metropolis

(1927)
Director: Fritz Lang | Music: Gottfried Hupperz
Symphonic Orchestra: 60/77 players| Chamber Orchestra: 25/33 players
Duration: 153‘

Metropolis is a pearl of the collective imagination, a real cult movie; it is the example of how the success of a movie is closely linked to its sound track, which is an integral and necessary part of it.

Ben Hur

(1925)
Director: Fred Niblo | Music: Carl Davis new version 1987
Orchestra: 70/80 players
Duration: 141’

In 1925 Ben-Hur cost almost four million dollars, which makes it the most costly silent movie ever made. The new sound track that Carl Davies has composed for it blends all of the story’s elements: romantic, dramatic and religious.

Battleship Potëmkin

(1925)
Director: Sergej Ejzenstejn | Music: Edmund Meisel (reconstructed original score)
Orchestra: 50/60 players
Duration: 75’ “

Battleship Potëmkin “ is one of the most famous films in the history of cinema: for its technical and aesthetic merits it is considered one of the best propaganda films ever made, as well as one of the greatest achievements of the seventh art.

Sunrise

(1927)
Director: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau | Music: (original reconstructed) Hugo Riesenfeld
Duration: 97’

Symphonic orchestra Hugo Riesenfeld’s original music remains inextricably linked with Murnau’s masterpiece, the winner of three Oscars and always listed in the top ten films in the history of cinema. “Melodrama, comedy and tragedy, between the country and the city, a magical film, alchemical and warm, symphonic and condensed, masterful in the creation of a dramatic cosmos of shadows and transparencies, deceptions and revelations” (Film Tv, 2004).

The Circus

(1928)
Director: Charlie Chaplin | Music: Charlie Chaplin
Orchestra: 30/40 players
Duration: 71’

This film, one of Chaplin’s greatest masterpieces, earned him what was then called an Academy Award (Oscar) "for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus".

City Lights

(1931)
Director: Charlie Chaplin | Music: Charlie Chaplin
Orchestra: 42/53 players
Duration: 103’

Today, critics consider it not only the highest accomplishment of Chaplin's career, but one of the greatest films ever made In 1949, the critic James Agee referred to the final scene in the film as the "greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid".

Rapsodia Satanica

(1917)
Director: Nino Oxilia | Music: Pietro Mascagni
Orchestra : 70/80 players

*This film can also be performed with piano accompaniment Duration: 55’ One of the most important silent movies of its generation, strongly inspired by D'annunzio. Its soundtrack was composed by Pietro Mascagni, one of the finest composers of his day and the first, in Italy, to write music synchronized with images.

Cabiria

(1914)
Director: Giovanni Pastrone | Music: Manlio Mazza
Orchestra: 16/20 players
Duration: 168’

It is the most famous Italian silent movie and the second mammoth production in the history of cinema after “Quo vadis?”, celebrated as one of the first, deliberate attempts, through the new art of cinema, to blend the expressive means of literature, painting, architecture, music and theatre.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

(1926) Directors: Lotte Reiniger, Carl Koch | Music: Wolfgang Zeller Symphonic Orchestra: 38 players | Chamber Orchestra: 25 players Duration: 65’

Inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, it is considered the first European animated feature film. Using the technique of silhouette animation – which revives the tradition of shadow puppets – this film represents a turning point of extraordinary importance in the history of cinema.

Frate Sole

(1918)
Directors: Ugo Falena, Mario Corsi | Music: Luigi Mancinelli
Orchestra: 50/60 players | Choir: 20 singers minimum
Duration: 70’

This masterpiece of Italian silent cinema, which was defined an “opera-film”, is a fine example of the fruitful and powerful association of images and music. With the contribution of the composer Luigi Mancinelli, Frate Sole truly innovated film music.

Carmen

(1915)
Directors: Cecil B. DeMille | Music: George Bizet (New adaptation by Gioele Muglialdo)
Orchestra: symphonic
Duration: 60’

“Ttriumph of superb acting and magnificent scenery…" "No small share of this artistic success is due to Mr. Wallace Reid's sympathetic interpretation of Don José" [Motion Picture Magazine] “Miss Farrar's 'Carmen' in the films is the greatest triumph the motion picture has yet achieved over the speaking stage" [New-York Tribune]

Pirates of the Caribbean - "The curse of Black Pearl"

(2003) Director: Gore Verbinski | Music: Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer
Orchestra: 60/70 players - Choir: 12 (minimum)
Duration: 143’

First episode in the Pirates of the Caribbean saga, it received 5 Oscar nominations: best actor in a leading role (Johnny Depp), best makeup, best sound mixing, best sound editing and best visual effects. The film is proposed with live sound track.

Deutschland von Oben

(2012)
Director: Charlie Chaplin | Music: Charlie Chaplin
Orchestra: 30/40 musicians
Duration: 71’

This film, one of Chaplin’s greatest masterpieces, earned him what was then called an Academy Award (Oscar) "for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing The Circus".