On Sunday, Sept. 30, the F.I.L.M. (Forum on Image and Language in Motion) Series hosted the Alloy Orchestra, a three-person musical ensemble that writes and performs live accompaniment to classic silent films, in Kirner-Johnson’s Bradford Auditorium. Ken Winokur is the group’s director and plays percussion and clarinet, Terry Donahue plays on Junk percussion, musical saw, and accordion, and Roger C. Miller plays keyboard. Working with an outrageous assemblage of peculiar objects, they thrash and grind soulful music from unlikely sources.
At 2 PM, the Alloy Orchestra accompanied Buster Keaton’s
The General
(1926). Arguably one of the greatest screen comedies ever made, Keaton directs and stars in the film as Johnny Gray, a locomotive engineer in the South during the Civil War. When Johnny’s train, “The General,” is stolen by Union spies, he risks life, limb, and love as he pursues his beloved railway engine. The action is especially suspenseful, because Keaton is in physical danger in at least 80 percent of the shots. Hanging onto a train in motion is risky enough, but climbing all over it and leaping from car to car shows Keaton upping the physical risk factor of his performance, in the vein of a modern actor like Jackie Chan. The combination of the bass drum from the Orchestra and the onscreen visuals of the train gave the sense that the viewer was running alongside Keaton.
At 8 PM, the Alloy Orchestra accompanied Dziga Vertov’s
The Man with a Movie Camera
(1929), a film about a day in the life in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. In the film, we see people going about their quotidian activities: sleeping, walking, working, commuting, marrying, divorcing, being born, and dying. It is self-conscious and self-reflective. We see the film, the film being filmed, the filmmaker being filmed, as well as people editing and viewing the film being filmed. The film attempts to show the ordinary everyday, but does it in an extraordinary way. One way Vertov does this is with animation, where at one point, the tripod stands itself up and the camera attaches itself to the tripod. We are also occasionally shown two screens merging with each other at various angles and a shot being played in reverse. The film is also a reflection on and of modernity, using various themes to accomplish this; the theme of spinning (presented itself by the spinning wheels of the train, the bus, the horse-drawn carriage, the sewing machines, the factory machines, the automobile, and the camera itself). Close to the end of the film, which is visually a “loud” compilation of various scenes throughout the film, the Alloy Orchestra performed an almost deafening cacophony of their own. Thus, when the film ended and the noise stopped, the viewer was left in a shocking and complete silence.
Performing at prestigious film festivals and cultural centers in the U.S. and abroad (The San Francisco Silent Film Festival, The Telluride Film Festival, The Louvre, Lincoln Center, The Academy of Motion Pictures, the National Gallery of Art, and others), the Alloy Orchestra has helped revive some of the great masterpieces of the silent era of film. An unusual combination of found and state-of-the-art electronics gives the Orchestra the ability to create any sound imaginable. Using their famous “rack of junk” and electronic synthesizers, the group creates beautiful music in a spectacular variety of styles. They can conjure up a French symphony or a simple German bar band from the 20s. The group can make the audience think they are being attacked by tigers, contacted by radio signals from Mars, or swept up in the Russian Revolution.
