University of Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities MA Heritage Studies: Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image
(RE)SCORING HÄXAN
Supervisor: Annet Dekker Second Reader: Eef Masson Thesis of: Fabrizio D’Alessio E-mail: fabriziodalessio@gmail.com Student Number: 11311487 Amsterdam, 4 February 2018TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 3 CHAPTER 1: SILENT FILM WITH MUSIC, A TRADITION OF NOVELTY 6 1.1 A theoretical gap between film and music 7 Looking for the added value 7 Cinema as event 9 1.2 (Re)scoring silent films, a new-old practice 11 Historically-accurate versions 12 Novel versions 13 CHAPTER 2: (RE)SCORING HÄXAN 15 2.1 Häxan, what is it? 15 A tormented reception 16 2.2 The phantom ‘first night’ of the Witch 19 Authentic conjectures 19 Back in time through DVD’s multiplicity 21 Surrounded by sounds in a Home Theatre 22 2.3 How does the Devil talk? 24 Into the gap 24 The voice of the Devil 25 Cult as event 27 2.4 A kiss of life for the Witch 30 Hypermediated performances 31 Songs for synchresis 32 Electronic sounds for contemporary audiences 33 CONCLUSION 34 BIBLIOGRAPHY 37
INTRODUCTION
The practice of adding music to a silent film is as long as cinema. Up until the standardization that came with the introduction of sound, music for the silent film was “an independent, ever-changing accompaniment” (Marks 6). From theater to theater, many different musicians worked on the same single silent picture, the form and style of accompaniment would vary from country to country, even theatre to theatre, and evolve and change over time. Orchestras and individual musicians (who improvised or used specially composed film music), traveling lecturers, actors reading dialogues behind the screen made each and every film screening of the same film a unique performative event.
Nowadays, live or recorded musical scores added to silent films range from the original and historically reconstructed orchestral or piano music, if this has been preserved, involve commissioning a new musical composition or improvisation, or use a collage of existing compositions. This current culture of dealing with old silent films on the one hand engages an aim for retaining ‘original intentions’ or ‘the author’s wishes’, approaching film as a firmly historical entity, bound by its own time of production. On the other, there is a profoundly different notion that silent film exists to be ‘updated’ and made into a living, breathing contemporary object (Donnelly 13-4). As music as an addition is able to remove or add to the original intentions of the film significantly, this phenomenon has opened up the possibility for silent films being re-contextualized through new music.
The main purpose of this thesis is to analyze how these musical reinterpretations of silent films are structured and realized, focusing on their different modes of production and reception, trying to detect the added value that music brings to silent film. My hypothesis is that the added value can be established not only by the music, but also by how it is produced and performed, and by other heterogeneous sonic elements of the (new) score like a voice-over narration or songs.
Chapter 1 will outline problems regarding the theoretical analysis of the relationship between film and music and introduce a theoretical framework based on Michel Chion’s concepts of cinema as an audiovisual relationship and Rick Altman’s theorization of cinema as event for examining the practice of adding music to a silent film. In Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen (1994), Michel Chion (French music composer, professor at the Université de Paris, and a prolific writer on film, sound, and music) elaborates a consistent terminology focused on the audiovisual relationship. According to Chion the most important result of the relation between image and sound is the added value, meaning “the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression (…) that this information or expression ‘naturally’ comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself” (5). The added value is an additional aesthetic level that sound can bring to an image and vice versa, and has a transformative effect over film. Chion developed forced
marriage, a method for the analysis of the interaction of sound and image that consists in
changing the music that accompanies a sequence of images in a film. When the combination of sound and image is altered the interpretation of a scene can change completely by adding a different soundtrack to the same images. I will show that this method can be especially useful to show the relationship between silent film and its (new) scores. With Sound Theory,
Sound Practice (1992) Rick Altman (professor of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the
University of Iowa and author of several studies on the history silent film sound) inaugurated a performative turn in film sound studies, which led to a stronger contextualization and historization of film production conditions and film exhibition
circumstances, taking into consideration information that until then were mostly unrecognized in the usual processes of film and that led to view and analyze also the context of its creation, performance, and reception. Altman’s elaboration of cinema as event provides the theoretical framework to analyze the different modes of performance and how it is produced and received. The sound performance that accompanied silent film screenings consisted, and still consists, of many different elements. The interaction between these elements is as important as the elements themselves. A mode of performance in the context of silent film sound therefore means a special constellation of devices, a special approach to certain practical problems, economical as well as aesthetical. In these different modes various ways of addressing the audience, diverse relationships to a single film and a different approach to sound and music can be observed.
In the second part of the chapter I will present a broad categorization of the contemporary practices of (re)scoring silent films based on different historiographical approaches: the historically-accurate (that tend to focus on 'authenticity' and fidelity to the historical context of the film's initial release) vs. the novel versions (that try to update the film and to expose it to a newer, younger audience). I will use some of the notions developed by Chion as a starting point for trying to answer to the following question: what is the added value that results from applying a forced marriage between (new) music and a silent film and how does it manifest? Altman’s elaborations are useful to expand these questions so to include in the analysis also the stages of production-performance-reception of cinema as event: what are the elements that must be taken into consideration to analyze the different results of diverse exercises of forced marriage, using music of different genres from different eras, recorded with different techniques and technologies, performed in different exhibition spaces and intended for different audiences?
After presenting the history and the characteristics of Häxan, a Swedish-Danish silent film written and directed by Benjamin Christensen in 1922, which I take as a case study, chapter 2 will expose the analysis of three of its different scores. Rather than performing a musical or filmic analysis, I will focus on a silent film with added music considered as event, and on the
added value it brings to the film. Within each of the subchapters I will provide information on
historical and theoretical features which centrally inform the category of each score, and outline the ways in which they are structured and realized, the technologies involved and the heterogeneous elements of sound that are most effective for the reinterpretation.
Subchapter 2.2 will focus on the characteristics of the historically-accurate practice of rescoring silent films and then analyze the reconstruction of the original orchestral accompaniment of Häxan’s Danish premiere, supervised by film music specialist Gillian Anderson and presented in 2001 in the Criterion Collection DVD edition with Dolby Digital 5.0 audio configuration, and how this technology is used to recreate the immersive soundscape of the original performance through three-dimensional sounds in a “home theatre” environment.
In Subchapter 2.3, I will analyze the score of Witchcraft Through the Ages (a version of Häxan made by Anthony Balch in 1968) focusing on how a new score far removed from the original context of a silent film can re-contextualize it, updating the film for a new audience, and altering its cultural reputation and status. Balch’s reinterpretation is probably the first known case of adding anachronistic music to a silent film after the silent era and uses not only music but also a voice-over narration by cult writer William Burroughs.
Dutch band Kinetophone, seen (and heard) at EYE Filmmuseum in April 2017 during the
Imagine Film Festival. This reinterpretation is characterized by the use of songs and
electronic music that is particularly effective in attracting a new audience of young people. In the conclusion I will expose the results of my research, my personal considerations about the continual musical reinterpretations of silent films and highlight the need for academic studies to take this mutability into account through the comparative analysis of multiple scores of the same silent film that can provide an informed knowledge of the elements that structure the rescoring practice, which could be used for making it more effective in attracting and interacting with contemporary audiences.
CHAPTER 1 SILENT FILM WITH MUSIC, A TRADITION OF NOVELTY
1.1 A theoretical gap between film and music
Cinema’s special relationship with music had started even before moving images were invented in the early 1890s. The strategies of combining dramatic scenes with music were drawn from prior and contemporaneous media and art forms, especially opera, but also magic lantern. Illustrated songs were, at least in the US, a precursor of cinema, insofar as this format helped define the relationship between narrative visual elements and music. Some early films were barely more than technically updated versions of illustrated songs (Altman,
Sound 114). This precise convergence of media practices constituted a large part of the
attraction for contemporary audiences. Seen in this light, cinema is much more dependent on music and musical formats than is generally acknowledged. But how is film music integrated with the visual element on the screen? Does the accompaniment by music necessarily mean subordination of music to all other aspects of the film? To what extent does a soundtrack influence and alter the interpretation of a film? To answer to this kind of questions, the analysis of the relationship between film and music has usually taken one of two paths. The first utilizes an analytic methodology, which is appropriated from musicology and privileges the musical over the filmic. This approach is focused on film music as ‘music’, treats score much as any other musical composition, discusses music for films instead of analyzing music
in films. It requires specialized competences and an adequate musical education and has
little possibility of discovering something about the way that music and film interact. The second approach emphasizes film theory over musicology, again having only a partial and limited vision of the relationship. Due to the lack of a common theoretical language, and because few scholars possess training in either one area or the other, the resulting literature of both these two approaches tends to be heavily biased in one direction or the other and prevents either discipline from discoursing effectively with the other. However, there have been scholars who have aimed to be interdisciplinary rather than relying solely on visual or musicological analysis. According to them, visuals and music should not be considered as two separate and unequal elements that are somehow pasted to each other but as two equal agents that fuse to create the audiovisual experience. This wave of film scholarship aiming to treat film as an audiovisual unit blossomed in the 1990s with early contributors like Michel Chion and Rick Altman, who aimed to overturn the traditional ‘visual bias’ of film scholarship.
Looking for the added value
In Audio-Vision: Sound On Screen (originally in French, 1990, translated in English by Claudia Gorbman in 1994, with a foreword by Walter Murch), Michel Chion developed the notion of
audiovisual contract, a pact to which the audio-spectator agrees to forget that sound is
coming from loudspeakers and picture from the screen. The audio-spectator considers the elements of sound and image to be participating in one the same entity or world. The result of the audiovisual contract is that one perception influences the other and transforms it (Chion, Audio-Vision 216).
Chion created a term for what he holds to be one of the most important effects of the relation between image and sound, added value, meaning
the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information or expression ‘naturally’ comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself” (5).
This added value that is created by the audio and visual components is an extra aesthetic level that sound can bring to an image and vice versa and has a transformative effect over film. The creation of added value is a joint effort of the image and sound. On the one hand, sound changes the image for the spectator into something different were it shown by itself, but on the other hand visualizing a sound makes the spectator hear the sound differently then if it would be played without images (Chion, Audio-Vision 21). When combined, sound and image create a total effect that is greater than the sum of its parts. The effect of the two elements together is more powerful and expressive than either could be standing on its own. In order to analyze the added value of film sound, Chion created two analytical methods: 1. the masking method, which involves the spectator watching a film a number of times, but paying attention to the audio and visual components separately. First the spectator listens to the soundtrack in isolation from the image, allowing focus on just that element, after this, the film is viewed with the sound muted, lastly, the spectator views the two together. According to Chion, approaching image and sound separately from one another allows the spectator to form a clearer opinion of the influence of both components on the experience of a film (187).
2. Forced marriage is another approach for the analysis of sound and image, and it is
especially useful for the relationship between silent film and its musical accompaniments. The forced marriage between sound and film is a creative method for analysis where the spectator changes the music that accompanies a sequence of images. As a consequence, the original combination of sound and image is altered and this exposes the arbitrary, but aesthetically valuable, nature that audiovisual elements can have (188). Moreover, the interpretation of a scene can change completely by adding a different soundtrack to the same images.
Next to added value, Chion developed the concept of synchresis, a universal, psychophysiological phenomenon, operating as spontaneously as any reflex. It consists of “perceiving as a single integrated phenomenon, manifesting both visual and acoustic components, the concomitance of a given auditory event and a visual event” (Chion, Film 214) on condition, both necessary and sufficient, that these two events occur simultaneously. Because this phenomenon is uncontrollable, it leads instantly to establish a relationship of close interdependence and ascribe to a single common source sounds and images that may be in their essence very different (Chion, Film 215). Due to the principles of added value and
synchresis any element of the soundtrack will enhance the meaning and value of the
accompanying image. Whether the sound element and the image have the same source, or whether the sound was added subsequently to the shot of the image is irrelevant to the process of synchresis.
Chion’s approach to audio/visual analysis creates a deep and rich reading and establishes a consistent vocabulary. Its specific and comprehensive quality does not privilege music and his work analyses the entirety of the audiovisual spectrum including voice, sound effects and ambient sound. However, Chion’s analysis is influenced by semiology and film narratology (both more or less based on structuralism) that applies the text metaphor in the field of film theories. Rather than focusing on the combination of film and music within the filmic text, I will analyze what happens when this combination is performed in a three-dimensional world. I will use the terminology and some of the notions developed by Chion as a starting point for trying to answer to the following questions: what is the added value that a (new) score brings to silent films and how does it manifest? What is the result of applying a forced
Cinema as event Considering film as an experience and cinema as an event, Rick Altman’s Sound Theory, Sound Practice (1992) frames a broader perspective on sound that approaches film in the context of its material existence in a three-dimensional world, paying equal attention to the film and to its contexts of production and reception. Altman started a performative turn in film sound studies that led to a stronger contextualisation and historization of film production conditions and film exhibition circumstances.
In the introduction of the book Altman notes that most of the literature “treat cinema as a series of self-contained texts, divorced from material existence and the three-dimensional world” (2) and centered and structured around the image and calls for works on sound that diverge from the familiar textual strategies inherited from literary semiotics and classical music analysis. Altman, finds it helpful “to conceive of cinema as event. Viewed as a macro-event, cinema is still seen as centered on the individual film, but according to a new type of geometry” (3) that integrates the worlds of production and reception, and takes into account all the components of the filmic experience. By proposing cinema as event, Altman not only makes room for sound theory, emphasizing the heterogeneous and material aspects of film sounds, but includes also production and reception circumstances, of which sound is an important aspect. Cinema is then seen as a live embodied experience and watching a movie implies being in a concrete space (the theater, our homes, a film museum, etc.), facing diverse kind of reproduction technologies, of musical and sound effect instrumentation, in a specific projection (or broadcast) in a particular circumstance.
In his model Altman identifies twelve attributes of cinema that had been hidden because of the textual approach to cinema: multiplicity, three-dimensionality, materiality, heterogeneity,
intersection, performance, multi-discursivity, instability, mediation, choice, diffusion, and interchange (4 – 14). According to Altman, traditional approaches to cinema have ignored
the lengthy process of conception – investment – production – distribution – exhibition - reception. “Until completion, the film is characterized by the multiplicity of its conceptors; after distribution, the film is characterized by the multiplicity of its receptors” (4). Recognizing the heterogeneous nature of the cinema experience not only opens the field to consideration of a broad range of objects, processes, and activities but has an especially direct impact on the study of sound, revealing the heterogeneous chain of objects and spaces which serve as its vehicle. Altman proposes cinema events as the intersection of many separate lines of work, throughout the production, reception, and cultural spheres. He also emphasizes the variety of motivational trajectories that bring diverse audience members to the theater and the variety of discourses, framed by diverse groups and addressed to populations varying from single individuals to the entire culture: a film does not carry a single message, unified, unilinear, and univocal, but reveals its multi-discursivity.
From the complexity of its financing and production to the diversity of its exhibition, cinema must be considered in terms of the material resources that it engages, for example revealing that, although conventional speaker placement attempts to identify sound sources with the two-dimensional area of the screen, sound occurs only in the three-dimensional volume of the theater at large. According to Altman, critics neglected important aspects of earlier film exhibition, which demonstrate that for most of its history it was a performance-oriented medium and that “film is always the product of performance” (9). From its earliest years, cinema has been constitutionally interrelated at every level with other media and forms of entertainment, thus “the values and standards associated with cinema cannot be described
independently of the models through which they are mediated” (11). Just as the mediation factor expands the notion of the cinema event, so does the phenomenon of choice, whether operative on the production side or the reception side. Altman highlights how ‘the film’ is fundamentally unstable in nature and how it is impossible to see and hear it as it was ‘originally seen and heard’, since there never was a single original. The construction of
cinema as event reveals the continuous interchange between production and reception of the
filmic text and the culture(s) at large. The diffusion of films throughout the culture in the form of various operational strategies leads in a number of largely unexpected directions. Although some of these twelve attributes are maybe too unclear and repetitive (some of them refer to the same aspect from different points of view), Altman’s elaboration of cinema
as event provides a theoretical framework to analyze silent film with added music as event. If
Chion’s added value stems from applying a forced marriage between images and sound, Altman’s model allows to expand the field of research so to include in the analysis also the stages of production-performance-reception of this event. What are the elements that contribute to establishing an added value in the musical reinterpretation of a silent film? What are the effects of diverse exercises of forced marriage, (using music of different genres and eras, recorded with different techniques and technologies, performed in different exhibition spaces and intended for different audiences) on the cultural status of the same silent film?
1.2 (Re)scoring silent film, a new-old practice
The practice of adding music to a silent film is as long as cinema. During the silent era music for film was “an independent, ever-changing accompaniment” (Marks 6). From theater to theater, many different musicians worked on the same single silent picture, the form and style of accompaniment would vary from country to country, even theatre to theatre, and evolve and change over time. Sound was added often in the form of music played live by musicians as the film was being shown, and this ranged from a single piano to an orchestra, that could dramatically vary in size (Altman, Silent 289). As a result, each film could have many different ‘scores’. “The existence of multiple interpretations created a tradition based on the continuous renovation of film music: a tradition of novelty” (Bellano 208).
This spontaneity was immediately lost once synchronized soundtracks were permanently fixed onto film stock in the 1930s. It did not take long for many of the practices and materials of the period to be forgotten or lost, but there have been efforts ever since to keep them alive. Cinematheques and other venues where silent films continued to be screened went on providing piano accompaniments and, in occasion of re-releases for anniversaries, also orchestral accompaniment. In New York, between 1939 and 1967, composer and pianist Arthur Kleiner, musical director for the Museum of Modern Arts Film Department, maintained the tradition of using original accompaniments, availing himself of the Museum's collection of rare scores; where scores were lacking, he and his colleagues created scores of their own, which were reproduced in multiple copies and rented out with the films. In the Soviet Union, a new score to Potemkin was composed by Nikolai Kryukov in 1950, and in 1967 a score compiled (by others) from pre-existing orchestral works by Shostakovich accompanied a re- release of October on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution. Similarly, a new score for Potemkin was fashioned from parts of Shostakovich’s symphonies when the film was restored to mark its fiftieth anniversary in 1975 (Cooke 39). This initially specialist activity has spilled over into the commercial arena. In the early 1980s two competing revivals of Abel Gance’s Napoleon vied for public attention in a number of major cities—one, based on the restoration of the film by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, with a score composed and conducted by Carl Davis, and the other with a score compiled and conducted by Carmine Coppola (Cooke 40). Since then, even wider diffusion has been given to silent film music with the issue of silent films on videocassettes, laser discs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs.
Today silent film classics and lesser-known works screened at theaters, film museums and festivals worldwide appeal to broad audiences with original, compiled, adapted, reconstructed, remixed or completely new musical accompaniment and reinvent the interpretations of silent film sound in novel ways. Moreover, the production and distribution of DVDs that contain multiple soundtracks that users can choose according to their personal tastes has opened up the possibility for silent films to be re-contextualized through music and related technologies, indeed made into a different object through being associated with strident and original musicians. The tradition of novelty is still alive and is still unsettled, with no consensus as to what the music should be like or how it should be presented, and with a much broader range of possibilities compared to the silent era. In Today’s Sounds for
Yesterday’s Films (2016) Donnelly tries to categorize this range of possibilities considering a
polar approach between Historically-accurate versions vs. Novel versions. On the one hand, there is the aim to capture 'original intentions' or 'the author's wishes', approaching film as a
historical entity, bound by and emanating from its 'own time', and on the other a notion that silent film exists 'to be updated' (perhaps to be 'improved').
Historically-accurate versions
The historically-accurate rescoring of silent films retains a traditional character to the score, often guided by knowledge of an 'original version' and tends to focus on the historical context of the film's initial release (Donnelly 13). Within this category, Donnelly makes a further division according to the historiographical approach followed for the rescorings, that can follow a scholarly history or an empathetic history approach.
The scores resulting from the scholarly history approach follow historical research, with the music as an outcome of archival work (22). These reconstructions are often presented at dedicated silent film festivals attended by academics, scholars or simple aficionados and might be seen as a film-musical manifestation of museum culture. Scholar-conductors like Gillian B. Anderson have reconstructed scores from historical sources, using primary information and often exploiting the musical compendiums of the period to furnish scores as close to what might have been as possible. In historiographical terms, this approach is closely related to the processes of traditional academic history, and “films screened along these lines usually have a strong sense of 'historical veracity' and scholarly responsibility (as curators of culture)” (Donnelly 22). Elsaesser noted “’the phantom ‘first night’ of archivists and historians” (58) and this notion seems the most important guide for this approach. Listening to the reconstructed original score, whether it special or compiled from pre-existing music, not only makes it possible to enjoy silent film as experience, but also get some impression as to how musicians intended particular sequences to come together with music. The music helps to construct the films and their imagery as historical texts and therefore to promise access to cultural meanings from the time of the first such performances. For this reason, resynchronizations of silent films with ‘original music’ are seductive as they seem to promise a historically accurate glimpse of another audio-visual era. Although reconstructions of original scores can be revelatory, they can also be misleading. While they represent a small corner of the wider culture of silent film accompaniment, they are unrepresentative of the silent era as a whole. Sometimes using the original cue sheets can turn the screening of a silent film into more of a museum experience than a cinematic one, emphasizing the aspect of the film that has dated. In many cases the original scores are either not very interesting or the pieces being used have become so clichéd that the effect on a present-day audience would be far different from what was originally intended. Over time radio and television has made some pieces of music so familiar and given them certain associations that they didn‘t have before, and it would be fatal to use them as accompaniment for silent films.
Coming from a similar point of view, the empathetic history approach is essentially interested in how it must have felt for audiences at the time of the film's release. While historical veracity is often important, it is not as important as the emotional tone of the music and some anachronisms may be acceptable in the service of the film (Donnelly 22). Many current pianists, such as Ben Model, Neil Brand, and Stephen Horne provide emotionally engaging music that broadly sounds as if it might have been played at the time focusing more on audience emotion than on historical authenticity. This mild compromise of historical veracity is acceptable for the cause of current accessibility. (Donnelly 22)
Novel versions
The novel versions tend to use a rhetoric of cultural renewal or ‘updating’ in their aspiration to make the silent film a valued object to a new context of consumption and to a wider contemporary audience (Donnelly 13). It is no accident that the increase in live music for films has developed hand in hand with the increase in film festivals that host such showings. This removes old films from the archive and repositions them as ‘viable’ films for contemporary audiences. Also within this category Donnelly makes a further division according to the historiographical approach followed for the rescoring, that may follow a
populist history or a issue-based history approach.
The populist history approach attempts to reformat and make accessible knowledge about the past to an audience who are assumed to need it structured in a 'modernized' and 'popular' manner (Donnelly 23). Setting silent films to scores consisting of electronic, rock and avant-garde music styles is the strongest point of contention within the silent film community. Many silent film enthusiasts, especially those of the older generations, consider this to be nothing less than sacrilege, but nevertheless, these soundtracks are increasing in popularity. Whether or not the particular music fits the particular film is a different issue altogether. The major risk concerning these reinterpretations is that there is a tendency for new scores to be commissioned from famous musicians in order to attract their audience to the screening and that sometimes musicians impose themselves upon the film with too much expressivity that risks to be intrusive and irritating for appreciating the film. Thomas Elsaesser bravely defended the disparaged Giorgio Moroder version of Metropolis (1926), an early example of novel and populist approach to scoring silent film released in the early 1980s with a soundtrack of electronic dance music and songs by Adam Ant, Bonnie Tyler and Freddie Mercury amongst other, in opposition to the obsessive focus on the earlier mentioned “the phantom ‘first night’ of archivists and historians” (58), typical of the historically accurate approach. Elsaesser notes that Moroder’s modern music allowed the audience to appreciate Fritz Lang’s film as again being imbued with a sharp feeling of modernity, which it would have had upon its initial release in the late 1920s.
Issue-based history takes historical objects and narrative and imbues them with
contemporary concerns. This approach replaces any sense of a proper history with one of partisan approach and acceptance of myriad points of view on the past (Donnelly 23). Electronic artist and musician DJ Spooky produced probably the most extreme example of a silent classic film reworked with the issue-based history approach. He made performances and released a DVD of Rebirth of a Nation (2005), a ‘remix’ of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), which although currently acclaimed as a founding moment in modern cinematic art, has a clear racist agenda. DJ Spooky not only adds a musical soundtrack but also a voice-over commentary on the film’s action, perhaps most notably during its sequences lauding the Ku Klux Klan. Yet the remix goes further than this, removing and repeating sections of the film and using superimposed graphics on the screen, all in aid of a critical discourse that becomes incorporated within the film. In these radical re-contextualizations, the film ceases to be the central focus, and the staging is definitely less respectful of the films, which lose completely their integrity and centrality in the event. There are a handful of films that seem to attract a large amount of interest from musicians supplying new music for silent films, probably because of their strongly stylized visual content, particularly German Expressionist horror films or other 'popular' silent classics. The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1922), for example, are constant sources
(1927), and Häxan (The Witch), a Swedish-Danish silent film written and directed Benjamin Christensen in 1922, which over the years had many musical soundtracks created by many different artists.
The aim of next chapter is to present the history and characteristics of Häxan. I will then apply the notions developed by Chion and Rick Altman’s theoretical model of cinema as event to discuss the main peculiarities of three different musical reinterpretations of Häxan. Within each of the subchapters I will provide information on historical and theoretical features which centrally inform the category of each score, according to Donnelly’s classification of historically accurate and novel versions, and focus on the ways in which they are structured and realized, the technologies involved in the stages of production-performance-reception and the heterogeneous elements of sound that are most effective for the reinterpretation.
CHAPTER 2 (RE)SCORING HÄXAN
2.1 Häxan, what is it?
One of the most unconventional films of the silent era, Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (English title: The Witches or Witchcraft Through the Ages) is a 1922 Swedish-Danish silent film about how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts. Christensen spent about two years researching and shooting Häxan, at great expense, but the quality of production is evident throughout the film. Based partly on Christensen’s study of the Malleus Maleficarum, a 15th century German guide for inquisitors, Häxan is presented as a faux documentary, but it can justifiably be called many things. “It can be considered the first cult movie, a genuine 'film maudit' (literally a 'cursed film'), the first true feature-length documentary (along with Nanook of the North, which was made the same year)” (Stevenson 1) and contains dramatized sequences that are comparable to horror films. I choose this silent film as a case study because during the years it has attracted a large amount of interest from musicians supplying new music for silent films thus allowing me to have a good number of musical reinterpretations to choose from for a comparative analysis.
Presented in seven parts, Häxan opens with "Sources," an illustrated lecture alternating intertitles with drawings and paintings to illustrate the behavior of pagan cultures in the Middle Ages regarding their vision of demons and witches. In addition, several large-scale models are employed to demonstrate medieval concepts of the structure of the solar system and the commonly accepted depiction of Hell. Part 2, "1488," is a series of vignettes theatrically demonstrating medieval superstition and beliefs concerning witchcraft, including Satan (played by Christensen himself) tempting a sleeping woman away from her husband's bed and terrorizing a group of monks. Also shown is a woman purchasing a love potion from a supposed witch, and a sequence showing a supposed witch dreaming of flying through the air and attending a witches' gathering. Part 3, "The Trials," and Part 4, "The Torture," have a disturbing intensity due to Christensen's depiction of how a villager's family is systemically destroyed by false accusations of witchcraft. Set in the Middle Ages, they concern an old woman accused of witchcraft by a dying man's family. The narrative is used to demonstrate the treatment of suspected witches by the religious authorities of the time. While many of the persecuted were elderly women whose greatest misfortune was being infirm, mentally ill or physically repulsive, the young were no less suspect and just as likely to be tortured or burned at the stake as showed in Part 5, "Sinful Thoughts." One also shudders at the insidious devices on display and put into action in the name of drawing confessions from so-called witches in the section entitled "Techniques." In the final part Christensen seeks to make the claim that most of the women who were accused of witchcraft were possibly mentally ill, and in modern times, such behavior is interpreted as a disease. His case revolves around vignettes about a somnambulist and a kleptomaniac, the implication being that these behaviors would have been thought of as demonically-influenced in medieval times whereas modern times recognizes them as psychological ailments. With Christensen's meticulous recreation of medieval scenes and the lengthy production period, the film was the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made, costing nearly two million Swedish kronor (Stevenson 26).
A tormented reception
Although it won acclaim in Denmark and Sweden, the film was banned in the United States and heavily censored in other countries for what were considered at that time graphic depictions of torture, nudity, and sexual perversion. In France for example, eight thousand Catholic women protested in the streets when it finally opened in that country in 1926, demonstrating against it outside the Paris theatre where the film premiered. In a complaint to the police they claimed that it was immoral and a mockery of the Church. Parisian surrealists liked it better and it became one of their favorite film (Stevenson 64). In English-speaking countries no one dared to show the film for many years.
Christensen intended Häxan as the first part of a trilogy of films, followed by The
Saint and The Spirits, but these projects were never realized. This was partly because of the
astronomical cost of Häxan, and also because of Christensen's departure from Europe for Hollywood, where he will direct films for American studios such as MGM or First National (later Warner Bros.) where such didactic, eclectic films were unthinkable.
In 1940 Häxan was reissued with an advance screening on 21 November, for a select group of cultural VIPs. On March 3, 1941, the film began its revival run at the Dagmar Theatre, with all proceeds going to benefit the Danish actor's guild. A new print had been struck for the occasion, and the intertitles were also changed (Stevenson 97). For this re-release of Häxan, Christensen filmed an eight-minute “Director's Introduction”. Addressing his audience, Christensen notes that even in our era of sound technology adding a vocal track to Häxan would diminish its effect. He was asked if he could imagine Häxan remade as a sound film:
That would naturally be impossible - how does the Devil talk, for example? Silent films had many drawbacks but also advantages. Sound film is objective; everything is explained through dialogue and they need not engage one's sense of fantasy. Sound film completely lacks the illusion and poetry of silent cinema; one cannot dream and fantasize further about the adventure and the characters contained in the film (Christensen, quoted in Stevenson 106).
However, through the years the film has screened in many different contexts: rock stars have appropriated scenes for their videos while avant-garde musicians and even performance artists have used the film as a backdrop for their own creative expressions. In 1995, for example, a touring "Loud Music Silent Film Festival" screened it as part of a performance by Judith Ren-Lay in collaboration with sculptor and multi-instrumentalist, Ken Butler. The French experimental music group Art Zoyd also created a soundtrack that was released on CD in 1997. This work was commissioned by the City of Copenhagen, the European Union designated Cultural Capital of Europe 1996. Häxan received a luxurious DVD release from the Criterion Collection in 2001. This DVD presented the Swedish Film Institute's restoration of the film with the reconstruction of the original orchestral accompaniment of the Danish premiere, supervised by film music specialist Gillian Anderson and performed by the Czech Film Orchestra, presented with Dolby Digital 5.0 audio configuration. This edition also presented the 1969 version of the film, renamed Witchcraft Through the Ages with a voiceover by William Burroughs and a jazzy musical score by Daniel Humair. In 2007, two new soundtracks for the film were composed in Britain. One by the British composer and performer Geoff Smith, to be performed on the hammered dulcimer, and one by the British electronic/industrial group Bronnt Industries Kapital. A DVD of the film featuring both soundtracks was released by Tartan Films in September 2007. The American film scoring ensemble The Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra premiered its new score for the film at the 2010 St. Louis International Film Festival. In 2011 Potemkine/Agnes b. released a DVD edition of the film that included Barði Jóhannsson’s symphony over the silent film with the
Bulgarian Chamber Orchestra that was also released on CD in 2006, and a score by Matti Bye composed in 2007. A new soundtrack from the Dublin Film Ensemble was commissioned by the Horrorthon Festival in 2014 for a presentation in the Irish Film Institute (Stevenson 117). Many other screenings of the film have occurred in various circumstances and contexts all over the world and down through the years, far too many to mention here. Häxan is, in many ways, the cinematic epitome of Freud's uncanny: we recognise elements of it as belonging to known and familiar categories, yet its overall formulation is bizarre and frustrating. To call it a horror film, a documentary, a horror-documentary or even a midnight movie is an easy way out, blithely falling back on the use of dominant genre categories to encapsulate a film that is all and none (Kendrick).
More than eighty years after its initial release, and more than thirty years since its reconstituted re-release, Häxan continues to confound, surprise and shock because it resists all boundaries, instead forcing viewers to develop new modes of spectatorship that take them outside the ordinary and remind them of the dynamic, always evolving nature of the cinema, then and now. “It is a film destined to be continually revived and rediscovered. Rather than just being 25 years ahead of its time it seems to be eternal” (Stevenson 118). The infinite possibilities that musical accompaniment can bring to a silent film ensure that Häxan always has the potential to be given a new life and a new audience, not just through the reconstruction of the original context of the film but also through new and experimental interpretations which can bring an added value to it.
2.2 The phantom ‘first night’ of the Witch
The trend towards a complex and sensitive approach to film accompaniment was a gradual, evolutionary process. Usually the first projected films were accompanied by a piano player who improvised mixing popular songs and the classics. Eventually, films were distributed with published cue sheets suggesting what the piano player (or possibly an organist) would ideally perform. By the 1920s a major film released in a large city might be accompanied by a full orchestra, but since orchestras cannot improvise, complete scores became a necessity. Yet again, these were most often a mixture of current hit tunes and classical favourites. The original score remained an exception. They were initially for “special films” (opera films, historical dramas, films on literary topics), a small corner of the film market designed to appeal to a middle-to-highbrow audience. Even those rare films that did have original scoring were only presented as such in special venues and on certain occasions (especially for first-run screenings), but for general distribution thereafter they received the standard compilation treatment (Altman, Silent 251–8). “The dominant mode of musical accompaniment in the silent era was the compilation, which cobbled together arrangements of popular and classical pieces according to the requirements of each scene “(Chion, Film 8). Orchestras usually played their musical accompaniment in a pit positioned underneath the screen. For Chion music coming from this space becomes the symbol of all traditional musical accompaniment to a film residing outside the film’s world. He defines pit music as the one “that accompanies the image from a nondiegetic position, outside the space and time of the action” (Chion, Audio-Vision 80), as opposed to screen music whose source is in the present time and place of the film’s action (diegetic). In the silent era pit music was part of a performative event, as “the presence of flesh-and-blood musicians in the theatre gave every screening, even those with modest means, the allure of a true performance” (Chion, Film 9). This allure of performance must have been definitely stronger at the premiere of important silent films, which were held in theatres with the accompaniment of a big orchestra.
Häxan premiered simultaneously in four Swedish cities—Stockholm, Helsingborg, Malmö
and Gothenburg—on 18 September 1922 and in Copenhagen on 7 November 1922. The musical program from the original premiere in Sweden, compiled from pre-existing compositions by Rudolf Sahlberg, has been lost. However, in the Criterion Collection DVD release of the film, musician, music historian and silent film music specialist Gillian Anderson recreates Häxan’s musical program from the Danish premiere based on “a list of musical cues printed in the theatre’s weekly program notes" (Anderson). Highlighting some of Altman’s attributes of cinema as event, the reconstruction of the original score of Häxan reveals the
multiplicity of a material audiovisual object, the DVD, resulting from the remediation of a live
performance. Dolby surround technology tries to recreate the immersive soundscape of the original performance through three-dimensional sounds in a ‘home theatre’ environment. The added value is related to historical authenticity, as producers of the DVD are trying to recreate a reaction in the audience as similar as possible to that of original ones. This reinterpretation is addressed to a small corner of the film market and designed to appeal to a middle-to-highbrow audience, who can afford to buy a Dolby Sound System in order to get the best audio immersive experience. Authentic conjectures The musical accompaniment to the Copenhagen premiere of Häxan was a compilation of well known orchestral pieces by a wealth of composers and included segments from Schubert's
Unfinished Symphony and Rosamunde Overture, Wagner's Tannhauser, Mozart's Titus Overture, Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and Ave Maria, Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei (Walker 47). It is believed that it followed the same musical accompaniment of the premiere in Stockholm. In an interview published shortly after the Swedish premiere, director Benjamin Christensen spoke enthusiastically about this compilation: I would like to take the opportunity to offer my warmest praise for the musical arrangement done for the picture by the conductor Rudolf Sahlberg. It is simply ideal. At first, I myself wanted to have the film run without music, but Mr. Sahlberg has made the music follow the images in a masterly fashion. It is quite simply the best musical arrangement I have ever heard for a film! (Filmjournalen, 8 Oct. 1922 quoted in Anderson).
As Anderson notes, since Christensen liked Sahlberg’s musical arrangements so much, it seems likely that he may have kept the same musical pieces for the Copenhagen premiere as well. Still, it can only be conjectured that the accompaniment for Häxan was the same in Stockholm and Copenhagen: “’Conjecture’, in fact, is the key word for almost everything about the musical reconstruction used here” (Anderson), as she cannot definitively say how much of each piece was used, when these pieces were used in the film, and which arrangements of each musical piece were used. Anderson’s musical team assumes that the order of the music was as published in the program, and when they set the music to the picture, they found that “this assumption could be made to work” (Anderson).
In Copenhagen, Häxan was accompanied by a 50-piece orchestra. For the reconstruction of the score Anderson used an 11-piece ensemble from the Czech Film Orchestra in Prague recorded in June 2001 “simply because it was more economical. However, such smaller-scale ensembles would have played these arrangements in many theaters, so it can be justified historically.” (Anderson). Thus the work of Anderson is made in the name of authenticity: “it sounds like it came from the same period as the images. Together they pull you back in time. They sound authentic together. The original chemistry and balance of the picture are restored (however hypothetically)” (Anderson).
In his 1995 article “Musicology and the presentation of silent film”, silent film musician Philip Carli admits that absolute historical authenticity can never truly be achieved. “The scholarly tools developed through the authenticity movement are invaluable in producing convincing, empathetic scores, but the 'authentic presentation' recedes like a rainbow the further it is pursued” (Carli 307-8). Compositions and performance media are now being evaluated on a more contextual footing. This is not to say that the musicians can ever fully capture the appeal or artistic excitement of musical works that were the emotional and artistic property of a recognizable but still distant society, but they can “at least fit them into a larger picture that may allow us to understand the content better” (Carli 302).
According to Carli the central dictum for film accompaniment is that the score and performance should serve the film above all, regardless of the particular genre of the music, which should never overpower the film. As long as it serves the film and of course it is always the situation that some people think it does and some people think it does not. Using the original music, especially as an academic exercise, gives to the film a kind of historical authenticity, because presenters try to recreate a reaction in the audience as similar as possible to that of original audiences, or at least an equivalent experience from a present-day perspective.
many of those accompaniments are not understood and not appreciated anymore by contemporary audiences, or they can distract the audience because during the years they have become too familiar. This problem was already known in the silent era. As Altman notes, in the early teens, critics sought to banish from the theatre any music that might compete with the film. In particular, “they recognized that accompaniment by title or lyrics shunted the audience’s attention from the film to the accompanist. Later critics witnessed the same process with overly familiar classical selections” (Altman, Silent 318). When spectators recognize the music from an opera, these critics claimed, their knowledge of that opera interfered with their concentration on the film at hand.
Whether the original musical accompaniment is still effective for the contemporary audience’s experience of the silent film or not, it is however an important historical information that should follow the film when it is remediated to digital carriers like DVD, laser disc or Blu-Ray, that offer the possibility of choosing from multiple soundtracks of the same film.
Back in time through DVD’s multiplicity
When silent cinema is mechanically synchronized with music and made available commercially as DVDs, this poses challenges for its reproduction within the aesthetics of digital media. Silent films and their (once) live accompaniments are experienced through new technologies: films are stored as digital files, able to be viewed and controlled by the user at home, and are accompanied by pre-recorded soundtracks. “The transformation of a silent film to DVD is not a pouring of old wine into new bottles, but a transformation of the old film to accommodate a new medium with new audience expectations” (Shepard 23.). This transformation of the old film concerns first and foremost the reconstruction of the technical aspects of the film (a steady projection speed, cleaning up of scratches etc.) and result in a digital enhancement of the film. Thus the transformation Shepard proposes is more than a reconstruction, as the true goal of a DVD edition of a silent film is “to transpose the original visual experience for modern eyes rather than to exactly replicate the original material or call attention to the technical processes of restoration” (24).
As for the aural experience, one highly notable phenomenon of recent years is how single silent films are made available on DVD with different musical accompaniment among which the spectator can choose. With multiple possibilities at their disposal, viewers can have different experiences of the same film actively choosing which soundtrack to use, revealing the multiplicity of Altman’s cinema as event: “Until completion, the film is characterized by the multiplicity of its conceptors; after distribution, the film is characterized by the multiplicity of its receptors” (Sound 4). According to Chion’s analysis of the audio-visual relationship, music brings multiplicity in itself. All music in a film, especially pit music, can function like the spatiotemporal equivalent of a railroad switch, a “spatiotemporal turntable” (Chion, Audio-Vision 81). Music enjoys the status of being a little freer of barriers of time and space than the other sound and visual elements. The latter are obliged to remain clearly defined in their relation to the diegetic space and to a linear and chronological notion of time. “Music is the turntable of space and time, the place of places that transcends all material barriers” (Chion, Film 410), and offers the possibility of travelling back in time, partially retrieving the film-going experience of the silent era.
DVDs reveal also another aspect of cinema as event, materiality: “As a material product, cinema quickly reveals the location and nature of its sound track(s), the technology used to produce them, the apparatus necessary for reproduction, and the physical relationship
between loudspeakers, spectators, and their physical surroundings” (Altman, Sound 6). Also Barbara Klinger reads the forms of film technology like DVD and laser disc as shifting the relationship with the spectator from one of abstraction to materiality, because the spectator also becomes owner of the filmic object: ‘This previously physically remote, transitory and public medium has thus attained the solidity and semi-permanent status of a household object, intimately and infinitely subject to manipulation in the private sphere” (57-8). While this account emphasizes the manipulative quality of home technology as a way of personalizing film, there is also a sense of film as a domestic object. The film collection becomes an object of taste reflecting the personality and attributes of the owner; film within the space of lifestyle. Furthermore, Klinger argues that to a large extent, the fan culture of DVD collectors is a fan culture focused on the technical aspects of the medium. The criteria according to which DVD collectors evaluate new editions in Internet chat groups and magazines does not concern the films themselves as artistic products. Rather, they focus on features such as the quantity and quality of bonus material, and the video and audio configuration (76-7).
The goal of most silent film restoration is distribution on home media formats. To do so, all silent films are transformed into sound texts. DVD and Blu-ray provide one or more audio tracks which are pre-synchronized with the video track. The viewer may be able to choose from different audio options (alternate scores, commentary, silence), but the fact remains that there is no live element to the digital content. Thus, while digitization offers unprecedented levels of access to the content of film history, it also poses significant challenges to the way in which modern audiences experience silent cinema. A special audio configuration comes in help when trying to recreate immersiveness, one of the characteristics of a live event.
Surrounded by sounds in a Home Theatre
Since the emergence of sound in movie theaters, audio configurations have not stopped evolving. Musicians in the pit were replaced by early speakers, and from the original mono feed, the cinema industry moved toward a stereo configuration to heighten the sensation of movement within the auditorium. However, as Altman notes, film theatres concentrate attention on the two-dimensional screen, with the bodies in a fixed position in front of it. In this context, sound is poorly served, for sound cannot exist in a two-dimensional context. “Though conventional speaker placement attempts to identify sound sources with the two-dimensional area of the screen, sound occurs only in the three-“Though conventional speaker placement attempts to identify sound sources with the two-dimensional volume of the theatre at large” (Altman, Sound 5). A big change in this respect was brought by Dolby audio configuration.
Dolby noise reduction and stereo sound system was introduced into the cinema in 1975 and quickly became associated with the Hollywood blockbusters of the mid to late 1970s, like Star Wars (1977) and Superman (1978). Recognizing the potential for decoding multichannel sound at home, in 1982 Dolby introduced Dolby Surround, a consumer version of the Dolby film sound project, which encoded the two tracks of any stereo program source with four-channel surround sound, in much the same way as movie soundtracks. Dolby Surround was developed with a clear objective, specifically to enhance the audio-visual experience, and it quickly gained marketplace acceptance. As home viewers (and listeners) began to set up more surround systems, the consumer electronics industry realized that a new category of home playback system was being forged. ‘Home theatre’, as it was called,
stagnating industry. As Chion points out, Dolby “allows for the creation of a true sensorial environment” (Film 130), and this feature allows sound film “to reconnect with the late silent era” (Film 131).
In the Criterion Collection DVD edition of Häxan, Anderson’s reconstruction of the original orchestral accompaniment is the only soundtrack presented with Dolby Digital 5.0 audio configuration, and this deliberate production choice aims at reproducing the immersive environment of the original premiere considered as performance. This strongly relates to Altman’s notion of mediation. From its earliest years, cinema has been constitutionally interrelated at every level with other media and forms of entertainment, and “the values and standards associated with cinema cannot be described independently of the models through which they are mediated” (Altman, Sound 11). Because the cinema event includes the spectator and, by extension, the spectator’s experience of other media, one measure of a film's success derives from spectator evaluations based on a set of pre-established notions about what constitutes reality, acceptable ending points, moral behaviour, entertainment, and so forth. “The equation of technology with experience in the home theater aesthetic (“You need hardware to enjoy these experiences to the fullness of their potential”) sells mediated sensations as the sensations to have. Mediation thus becomes the ultimate arbiter of experience” (Klinger 42). Home theater makes media boundary crossings strikingly visible. Its synthesis of multiple technologies forces reconsideration of traditional estimations of medium specificity and also of historical authenticity because, as Altman put it, “only by recognizing the tendency of representational technologies to take on multiple identities, constantly redefined, can we understand the complexities of the historical object” (Sound 123). The enhanced use of the two surround channels, placed at the sides and rear, allows the narrative space to leap off the screen and extends to the whole of the cinema and of ‘home theaters’ auditorium. The spectator is now immersed inside the space rather than outside watching it on the screen, in the same way that happened in the silent era. The added value of this musical reconstruction is related to historical authenticity because it tries to recreate a reaction in the audience as similar as possible to that of original audiences of Häxan, but this is made possible only with the aid of digital means and the historical context is understood only through new representational technologies.
2.3 How does the Devil talk?
As Davis very timidly mentions in a footnote of his essay, Witchcraft Through the Ages is probably the first known attempt of adding anachronistic music to a silent film: “the 1968 version of Häxan is perhaps the 'grand-daddy" of utilizing contemporary music for silent film exhibition” (Davis, footnotes 97). The man responsible for this first musical reinterpretation of Häxan was experimental filmmaker Antony Balch (1937-1980), who turned a childhood love for horror movies into a career as an exhibitor, distributor and occasional filmmaker. While living in Paris in the early 1960s, Balch befriended William S. Burroughs and his circle while the author was living at the Beat Hotel. In 1963, they collaborated on the 10 min. experimental film, Towers Open Fire. The two went on to make the even more radical film
The Cut- Ups (1966), and the 70mm Bill and Tony (1972). Also in 1963, Balch started his
distribution career by securing the British rights to Tod Browning’s infamous film, Freaks (1931), and then successfully petitioning for an end to Britain’s 30 years ban on it. Balch went on to manage two art house theatres in London, while also distributing sex, horror, and art films, including Russ Meyer’s Supervixens and Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of my Demon
Brother.
Balch supervised the creation of a version of Häxan in which most of the intertitles were removed and replaced with narration (drawn mostly from Christensen's original texts) spoken by William S. Burroughs in his inimitable vocal fashion. Balch also added a jazz score recorded in Paris by drummer and jazz composer Daniel Humair (who worked with artists such as Gerry Mulligan, Don Cherry and Dexter Gordon), played by a quintet including Jean-Luc Ponty on violin. Some additional cuts were also made, probably to satisfy British censors. The spectacular witch’s flight to Bloksbjerg, the nun’s hysteria in the church and several scenes of torture were shortened. These modifications, as well as running the film at the standardized projection speed of 24 frames per second (instead of the historically accurate 20 fps) to conform to the requirements of sound film, reduced the film's running time from 104 minutes to 77 minutes. Released as Witchcraft Through the Ages it premiered in November 1968, at London’s Times Cinema with British Board of Film Censors 'X' certificate. It was paired with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). It hit the United States at the Elgin, New York's legendary repertory theatre, in February 1970, double-billed with Sergei Parajanov’s Wild Horses (Stevenson 114). Following some of Altman’s attributes of cinema as event, Witchcraft Through the Ages is an example of heterogeneity, as it is a different version of Häxan, based on a deliberate choice stemming from a social and countercultural attitude and also from a commercial need. It locates at the intersection of the discourses of a variety of social groups who came to appreciate the film, revealing its multi-discursivity. The added value of music and narration over film is cultness. From a silent era oddity, Häxan becomes a cult movie and successfully reaches a new audience, mainly young and part of a countercultural movement. Modern music and Burroughs’ voice question the usually accepted hierarchy of film over sound and cause a kind of cult transference, from cult narrator to ‘cultized’ silent movie.
Into the gap
Film historians have written about silent films unbound to musical accompaniment as if they were complete unities, consensual objects. Focusing on radically different scores suggests that they are not. “The soundtrack is more than merely a ‘bolt-on’ to the ‘film’ but more an
