‘Sounds of Silents’ Movies at the KC Library
By Robert W. Butler, The Kansas City Star, Mo.
Mar. 9–Silent films were rarely silent. In the early days of movie exhibition, live music always played an important role.
So for their spring series of free classic silent films, the deep thinkers at the Kansas City Public Library have commissioned local composer Jeffrey Ruckma to create original scores to be performed live by his Spoonbender Consort.
The “Sounds of Silents” screenings will be at 3:30 p.m. Saturdays in the Helzberg Auditorium of the Central Library, 14. W. 10th, with the exception of the June 21 program, which will be presented in the new auditorium at the Plaza Branch, 4801 Main.
“They let me pick the movies. I couldn’t believe it,” said Ruckma, whose score for G.W. Pabst’s silent drama “Pandora’s Box” has been performed here several times.
“About a year ago I approached them with a few proposals for silent films with music. I thought maybe someday they’d call me back to do one of them. To my amazement, Paul Smith from the library called and said, ‘How about doing an entire series?’ “
The films Ruckma chose aren’t the usual comedies or swashbucklers. He went for more esoteric titles — silent travelogues, films from the earliest days of cinema, as well as a studio-produced melodrama. The breadth of the movies allowed him to let his musical imagination run free.
“How am I approaching this? I think I have a different answer for each film. Mostly I’m trying to defy expectations. Plain piano accompaniment has been done to death with silent films, so we’re going nowhere near it.”
The first program, scheduled for Saturday, features shorts from the earliest days of filmmaking. Many are by French siblings Auguste and Louis Lumiere, who originated the commercial film industry by showing their vignettes of daily life — workers leaving a factory, a train pulling into a station — to an eager public. Also on the program are an experimental film by visionary French artist Marcel Duchamp and “Rain,” a Dutch documentary hailed as a great film/poem.
“The scores for this program range from piano with winds and strings to a careering jazz quartet,” Ruckma said. “There’s also some folk instrumentation and an eclectic arrangement featuring cello-accompanied dulcimers, toy pianos, oboe and bells.
“The music covers lots of territory … it’s vaguely comic for several shorts that were clearly posed for the camera. At other times we try to superimpose a feeling that might not have been there without the music. There’s amazing footage of oil fires in what is now Afghanistan, and we do a sort of somber take on that one.”
The April 19 program centers on “Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life.” This 1925 documentary by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack — who eight years later would give the world “King Kong” — was shot in Iran.
At its center are the Bakhtiari, barefoot nomadic tribesmen who each year herded their livestock up dangerous snow-covered mountain passes to reach fertile grazing lands on the other side of the mountain range. Each year was a race to reach food before the animals starved.
“We’re using regional instruments for this one — a saz, an oud, a dumbek, and doing some variations on a traditional melody of the Bakhtiari. But we’re inviting people to take a fresh look at the Middle East rather than dragging out the same old musical cliches.”
The series continues May 17 with “African Paradise,” a film by world-renowned explorers and Kansas natives Osa and Martin Johnson.
It concludes June 21 with G.W. Pabst’s “Diary of a Lost Girl,” in which Kansas native Louise Brooks exudes star power as a prosperous pharmacist’s daughter who endures seduction, pregnancy and reform school, only to end up in a brothel.
“She was a flapper,” Ruckma said of Brooks, “but a flapper for the dark side.”
Playing for the Spoonbender Consort will be Mark Cohick (“he plays all things woodwind, plays jazz, he’s in the Symphony, in the Starlight pit”), cellist Dana Woolard-Hughlett and Steveland Morse on percussion and accordion.
“I’m writing like crazy,” Ruckma said, “but in a pinch these guys improvise so well I could give them some themes, and they’d get us through.”
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“Lenexa One Mile,” the coming-of-age drama shot here in 2005 by actor/director/writer (and Lenexa native) Jason Wiles, will be released March 18 on DVD. But you’ll have to look for it under its new title: “Full Count.”
The film stars Jason Ritter, Chris Klein, Jennifer Hall, William Baldwin, Michael Rooker and Michael Beach.
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Copyright (c) 2008, The Kansas City Star, Mo.
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