OLD FILMS, NEW SOUNDS: SCREENING SILENT CINEMA WITH ELECTRONIC MUSIC

BLAIR DAVIS OLD FILMS, NEW SOUNDS: SCREENING SILENT CINEMA WITH ELECTRONIC MUSIC Résumé: Les diverses circonstances qui entourent le visionnement d’un film dans un cours de cinéma influencent profondément la réaction des étudiants face à l’œu-vre en question. Que ce soit l’information fournie au sujet du film avant sa projec-tion ou la qualité de la copie utilisée, les choix de l’instructeur peuvent avoir un impacte déterminant (et parfois imprévu) sur la réception du film. Cet article retrace les expériences d’un instructeur qui a tenté d’identifier les divers effets sur les étu-diants de la musique d’accompagnement des films muets. Au cours d’un vision-nement en particulier, une musique d’accompagnement électronique a été très efficace au près des étudiants. Cela a mené à une série d’expériences pédagogiques visant à déterminer si les étudiants répondent aux films muets plus favorablement si l’accompagnement est moderne plutôt que traditionnel. Cette recherche a été entreprise non seulement pour répondre à mon propre besoin d’améliorer mes méthodes d’enseignement, mais aussi pour fournir un modèle à d’autres instruc-teurs qui veulent diversifier leurs façons de présenter des films muets. ne of the simplest demonstrations that a film studies instructor can under-take in the classroom involves familiarizing students with the difference between film and video projection. From 2004 to 2006 I taught an introductory film history course in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University covering cinema’s first five decades. While approximately twenty-five percent of the students taking this course were enrolled in the department’s film production major and were actively creating their own 16mm films, the remain-ing students were largely taking the course out of personal interest or to fulfill requirements for other degrees. As such, the majority of students were not nec-essarily familiar with the technical differences between film and video, nor their variability in image quality. In order to demonstrate this distinction, a compari-son was undertaken using the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Germany, 1919, Robert Weine). Starting from the beginning of the film, a DVD print was shown on screen via a data projector, which ran for about five minutes. The same opening scenes of the film were then projected via a 16mm projector, and this is the format through which students viewed the entire film. This demonstration subsequently led to discussions in tutorials about the differ- CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES VOLUME 17 NO. 2 • FALL • AUTOMNE 2008 • pp 77-98 ences between the film and video image, with many students noting that they had not necessarily been aware of the difference in image quality until it was pointed out to them. One problem with this teaching demonstration, however, was the fact that the 16mm print of Caligari had no musical soundtrack, something that the stu-dents had become accustomed to having with their silent films during the semes-ter. This factor would ultimately lead to subsequent demonstrations testing the notion of whether modern electronic music could be used to enhance student engagement with silent films in the classroom. I decided to fill the silence of the Caligari print by synching up a CD during the screening (a senior colleague at another institution occasionally played jazz albums in such a situation). The album selected to accompany Caligari was Songs of a Dead Dreamer by DJ Spooky, featuring music that might be generally described as “electronica” by some, or “trip-hop” by others (my students used both of these terms to describe the music, for example). The terms largely refer to music that has been created by a Disc Jockey (DJ) through combining pre-existing musical samples together and/or crafting electronic tones into rhythmic structures–criteria that informs the definition of electronic music for the purposes of this essay.1 With its dream-like/surreal soundscapes, Songs of a Dead Dreamer was well suited to the expres-sionist imagery presented in Caligari, and the album’s title served as a thematic link to the film’s depiction of somnambulism. The music was an overwhelming success with the students, who noted that the music and imagery often became synchronized, whereby when the scenes in the film changed so too did the music similarly change in its beat or tempo.2 The success of the screening led to others of its kind in the same semester. The Soviet montage film Man With a Movie Camera (Soviet Union, 1929, Dziga Vertov) was accompanied by a new score from The Cinematic Orchestra (which had been specifically composed by the group for the film in 2001).3 This was fol-lowed later in the semester by the short French surrealist film Ballet Mechanique (France, 1924, Ferdinand Leger), accompanied by the first two tracks from elec-tronica artist Amon Tobin’s Chaos Theory album. Anecdotally, the feedback I received from both my students and my teaching assistant indicated that they actually preferred to hear modern music while watching silent films, because it allowed them to engage with the films more fully than if a more traditional piano, organ or orchestral score had been used. This strong anecdotal feedback ultimately led to the need for more objective evidence regarding students’ musi-cal preferences for silent films in subsequent semesters. This type of positive student response to a silent film is certainly ideal, but is not always achieved in the classroom. Jan-Christopher Horak observes, for example, that students do not always fully appreciate silent films, particularly when shown a poor print: 78 BLAIR DAVIS Amon Tobin performing a live DJ set. Teaching silent film courses on a regular basis, I’m one of the first to admit that the advent of DVDs has made my job easier. Trying to con-vince students that the film they are watching is not only a cinema clas-sic, but also as sophisticated and modern as any film made in the sound era, is a particularly hard sell when the print in question is a ‘dupey,’ fifth-generation 16mm reduction from the 35mm nitrate original, and dead silent to boot. When shown DVDs produced from restored master materials, and including a full orchestral score or at least piano accom-paniment, students are much more willing to give silent films a chance.4 Here the issue is that students will respond differently to a silent film depending on a variety of factors, such as the quality of the print selected. Instructors make numerous choices concerning the way in which the class is conducted and mate-rials are integrated. Many of these choices, such as which print of a film to use, may seem relatively simple, but they can often have larger, unforeseen implica-tions. One illustration of this involves Edward T. Hall’s notion of proxemics—the relationship of social space to culture. In The Hidden Dimension, Hall defines proxemics as the “use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture,”5 noting for instance that the arrangement of furniture in a room is typically determined by cultural preferences. Hall examines in particular how fixed seating arrange-ments will create a remarkably different social dynamic than when individuals are able to move their seats, with conversation being more prevalent in the latter case.6 Instructors will typically notice a difference in the quality of discussion in a room with fixed seating, such as rows of desks or tables, as opposed to sitting around a table with moveable chairs where eye contact is readily accessible. If a simple choice like seat arrangement can affect classroom dynamics, instructors OLD FILMS, NEW SOUNDS 79 must also be aware that the decisions they make in terms of how films are pre-sented can also have important consequences for students. Since viewers regularly respond to films emotionally as well as cognitively, it is only natural that a student’s emotional response can occasionally overwhelm their interpretations of a film. As an instructor, I have noticed that those students who describe being bored by a given film often cannot offer much in the way of interpretation of that film during group discussions, and that consequently they often perform poorly when writing about the film. Torben Grodal argues in Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film, Genres, Feeling and Cognition that “cog-nitive and perceptual processes are intimately linked with emotional processes within a functionally unified psychosomatic whole.” He sees a “systemic relation between the embodied mental processes and configurations activated in a given type of visual fiction and the emotional ‘tone’ and ‘modal qualities’ of the expe-rienced affects, emotions and feelings in the viewer.”7 Grodal’s theories concern-ing the interrelationship of cognitive and emotional responses to visual stimuli can be extended to auditory cues, as the act of perception is rarely unconnected to other bodily senses–hearing typically being primary among them. This combi-nation of visual and auditory stimuli serves to create an environment in which the act of perception normally occurs, hence emotional responses may be activated by one or more elements of that environment. Such conceptions of spectatorship are indicative of what Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Anderson describe as an ecological approach to film in their anthol-ogy Moving Image Theory: Ecological Considerations. Described as a “theory about everyday perceiving in the world,” this ecological approach “takes into account routine, everyday selection on the part of the perceiver...[examining what] information we choose to gain and how we gain it from a plethora of mov-ing images.”8 Again, given the largely inseparable nature of image and sound in cinematic spectatorship, auditory information may be included in considerations of audience perception when analyzing the effects of any given audio-visual environment on individual viewers.9 Such tenets are in keeping with the larger tradition of media ecology, which Neil Postman describes as “the study of media as environments.” A main concern of the field of media ecology, says Postman, is about “how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling and value.... The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content and impact on people.”10 With these notions of “understanding” and “feeling” paralleling Grodal’s conception of “cognitive” and “emotional” responses to cinema, this ecological framework may be seen as vital to an understanding of how the environment created by an instructor’s myriad of choices, concerning both the visual and auditory components of a classroom film screening, can affect the impact that silent films have on students. The act of replacing traditional forms of music with contemporary ones to accompany silent films is a process that is not unfamiliar to the majority of mod- 80 BLAIR DAVIS ern students. Dominique Russell argues that film music currently exists within a changing “soundscape,” whereby “there has been a change in our sound envi-ronment through the proliferation of ‘private sound bubbles,’ created through compact music players. Headphone technology creates private soundtracks to common images.... Insulated from room tone and ambient noises, two head-phone wearers become spectators to two very different scenes, depending on what they are listening to.”11 Students have become accustomed to recontextu-alizing visual phenomenon by selecting alternative auditory cues to experience privately via iPods, mp3 players and other such devices. As Russell suggests, when the spectator changes the soundtrack that accompanies visual stimulus, the very scene itself changes due to the resulting environmental shift created by the new relationship between sight and sound. It was the desire to create such a shift that led Anna Siomopoulos, Patricia Zimmermann and their colleagues at Ithaca College in New York to commission a new score by Fe Nunn in 2004 for a screening of Within Our Gates (USA, 1920, Oscar Michaeux) as a part of Black History Month. Combining a jazz quartet, African drumming and spoken-word performance, Siomopoulos and Zimmermann describe this new score as an attempt to “destabilize the film text, reanimate film reception, and complicate film spectatorship through music, spo-ken word, and multiple voices.” The project was motivated by the need to “rethink the exhibition of politically significant silent films” in order to “create a new reception context” for them.12 The act of incorporating modern music into silent film screenings is also not without precedent outside of academia. Since 1982, Pordenone Italy has hosted Le Giornate Del Cinema Muto, a silent film festival that has regularly featured contemporary scores written and performed by such composers as Wim Mertens and John Cale.13 In 1984, Giorgio Moroder compiled a modern rock score for a theatrical re-release of Metropolis (Germany, 1928, Fritz Lang). Within Canada, the Vancouver-based theatre The Blinding Light (operating from 1998-2003) reg-ularly ran screenings of such silent films as Metropolis, City Lights (USA, 1931, Charlie Chaplin) and Man With a Movie Camera featuring live musical accompa-niment by the group Eye of Newt, which incorporates sampled music into their performances. The Blinding Light also hosted screenings with the Vancouver group Deep Blue Funk Films, which paired the music of Massive Attack with Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in a performance labeled “Massive Caligari Attack.” Deep Blue Funk describes this approach as a “synchronicity experiment,” an idea they see as borrowed from Carl Jung’s concept of the “harmony of two otherwise unre-lated events that occurs at a particular moment in time and space.”14 Furthermore, DJ Spooky has himself created a new electronic score for Birth of a Nation (USA, 1915, D.W. Griffith). Titling the performance Rebirth of a Nation, it has been commissioned in recent years by festivals in the United States, Paris and Vienna, including a festival held by The Lincoln Center for the OLD FILMS, NEW SOUNDS 81 ... - tailieumienphi.vn