Silent films weren’t really “silent.” Musical performances almost always accompanied the great films of the past.
Bringing live music back to the screening of silent films is the mission of Alloy Orchestra, which will perform its contemporary score alongside a projection of a restored version of Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 science-fiction epic “Metropolis” at Georgia State University’s Rialto Center for the Arts on Nov. 12.
“Silent films were at the time the biggest multimedia event in the history of people,” says percussionist Ken Winokur, a co-founding member of Alloy Orchestra. “When you put a live element in it, it’s more than the sum of its parts.”
Composed of a synthesizer player and two percussionists, Alloy Orchestra was founded in Cambridge, Mass., in 1991 when a local cinema wanted live music to accompany a screening of “Metropolis.” Since then, the musicians have written and performed scores for dozens of silent films.
One thing that distinguishes the group is its use of unusual objects to create sound effects and music.
“The percussionists play anything they can get their hands on from plumbing pipes to horseshoes to a bedpan to musical saw,” says Winokur. “We can create these elaborate soundscapes that can give a lot of effects to the films. They create interesting dreamlike, rich textures.”
As the orchestra gained in popularity and began to travel on airplanes to gigs, they had to let go of some of the bigger objects they used to create its music, save one.
“The one piece we have not been able to get rid of, it’s been with us since our first performance, it’s what we call the ‘comal,’” says Winokur. “It’s a piece of galvanized air-conditioning duct work. It weighs in at least 40 pounds. It sets off this kind of squealing sound when you rub it lightly with a stick.”
It’s an appropriate sound for the score of the unnerving film “Metropolis.”
Lang’s film is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and explores the vast gulf between the rich and the poor. Its enormous futuristic sets and inventive visual world remain endlessly inspirational for artists, designers and filmmakers.
“It’s the first great science-fiction film ever, and it’s an astounding, compelling film,” says Winokur.
In 2005, a 16mm reduction negative of the original cut of the film, which previously had been believed to be lost, was discovered in the archives of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2010, Alloy Orchestra was asked to create and perform a new score for the American premiere of the newly restored version.
“It is half an hour longer than any version we’ve worked with,” says Winokur. “It has new characters, it’s totally re-edited. We had to completely rewrite our score. It is the actual original director’s cut they showed in Berlin. After that, distributors cut it down, but this is the only one as Lang would have edited it. It hugely improved this film.”
Creating a score to match Lang’s vision was a creative challenge.
“What’s interesting as a musician is to try to do music that’s of 1927 when it came out, and 2034 in the future, and where we are right now,” he says.
Alloy’s greatest accomplishment of all may be proving that watching silent movies isn’t a dry exercise in film history.
“What’s surprising for people is how entertaining they are,” says Winokur. “They’re historic, they’re a hundred years old, it’s how films started. But more than that, they’re astoundingly entertaining.”
EVENT PREVIEW
Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” Accompanied by Alloy Orchestra
8 p.m., Nov. 12. $25. Rialto Center for the Arts, 80 Forsyth St. NW, Atlanta. 404-413-9849.
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