The Lost Musicians, Music in the Cinemas, and The Stone of Mazarin
June 6th
Barbican Cinema
The Barbican's final seminar of the 12th British Silent Film Festival was a thoughtful dissertation by Neil Brand on the forgotten history of musical accompaniment in local cinemas of the time: not usually a single piano player improvising, Brand points out, but often a 3 to 6-piece orchestra, depending on the size and prestige of the auditorium. To demonstrate this, Gerry Turvey listed a series of cinemas in the Finchley area (such as The Grand Hall, The Rink cinema, the New Bohemia and the Coliseum - the latter still in operation as The Phoenix), where the various outlets competed with each other for the best orchestras to attract the biggest audiences.
With the aid of gifted American accompanist Philip Carli, there was also a brief demonstration that major silent films were never improvised, thanks to cue sheets provided by the major studios: Carli played a brief introduction to Douglas Fairbanks' 1926 adventure The Black Pirate, based on instructions contained on the original Paramount cue sheet.
To finish off the afternoon, Brand accompanied a nostalgic old British segment of the Sherlock Holmes series starring Ellie Norwood (in the days before Basil Rathbone made the role his own):
The Stone of Mazarin* (U)
(GB 1923. 23m. bw. silent; Holmes recovers the missing emerald with the aid of his trusty violin and a wax dummy.; w: Geoffrey H. Malins, P.L. Mannock, from the story by Arthur Conan Doyle; d: George Ridgwell; s: Ellie Norwood, Hubert Willis, Lionel d'Aragon, Tom Beaumont, Laurie Leslie.)
Barbican Cinema
The Barbican's final seminar of the 12th British Silent Film Festival was a thoughtful dissertation by Neil Brand on the forgotten history of musical accompaniment in local cinemas of the time: not usually a single piano player improvising, Brand points out, but often a 3 to 6-piece orchestra, depending on the size and prestige of the auditorium. To demonstrate this, Gerry Turvey listed a series of cinemas in the Finchley area (such as The Grand Hall, The Rink cinema, the New Bohemia and the Coliseum - the latter still in operation as The Phoenix), where the various outlets competed with each other for the best orchestras to attract the biggest audiences.
With the aid of gifted American accompanist Philip Carli, there was also a brief demonstration that major silent films were never improvised, thanks to cue sheets provided by the major studios: Carli played a brief introduction to Douglas Fairbanks' 1926 adventure The Black Pirate, based on instructions contained on the original Paramount cue sheet.
To finish off the afternoon, Brand accompanied a nostalgic old British segment of the Sherlock Holmes series starring Ellie Norwood (in the days before Basil Rathbone made the role his own):
The Stone of Mazarin* (U)
(GB 1923. 23m. bw. silent; Holmes recovers the missing emerald with the aid of his trusty violin and a wax dummy.; w: Geoffrey H. Malins, P.L. Mannock, from the story by Arthur Conan Doyle; d: George Ridgwell; s: Ellie Norwood, Hubert Willis, Lionel d'Aragon, Tom Beaumont, Laurie Leslie.)
posted by Joe at 10:40 AM
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