movies

Silent (and not quite silent) film plans 2   Recently updated !

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The showing of the 1924 film America with my accompaniment went well. You can catch it on YouTube. To be exact, it’s the audio from the Plaistow Library together with video copied from the Internet Archive, the same video that was shown at the library.

My next planned show in Plaistow will be the traditional Halloween horror movie, this time the 1931 Frankenstein, with Colin Clive in the title role and Boris Karloff as the monster. Yes, I know, it’s not a silent movie. But it has little music, and some silent film accompanists have added badly-needed music to it. That’s what I’ll be doing. It’s LIVE!!

Gugusse et l’Automate: Rediscovery of the first robot film

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If you’ve seen the movie Hugo (and you should), you remember the wonderful scene where a humanoid automaton is restored and goes into action, revealing an important secret. Georges Méliès found these machines fascinating. His 1897 Gugusse et l’Automate presents an automaton (played by an actor) in what has been called the world’s first film about a robot. Bill McFarland brought a box of old films from Grand Rapids, Michigan to the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Virginia, and one of them was a third-generation copy of Gugusse. Film historians had known it existed, but no one now living had seen it. The preservation experts digitized the one-minute film, which I’m sure must have been fragile, and it’s now available freely on YouTube and other sites.

Here’s a link to the video on the LOC site. I’ve edited this post to link rather than embed, since the embed wasn’t always working.

Upcoming silent film: Peter Pan in Newmarket

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A new venue! On Wednesday, February 11, I’ll be accompanying the 1924 silent film Peter Pan at the Newmarket, NH Library! It went over well when I did it in Plaistow, and the audience participated where they were supposed to.

If Newmarket is more convenient for you than Plaistow, or if you’d just like to see it again, drop in! There’s no charge and no requirement to sign up, and there will be refreshments.

New on YouTube: A Christmas Carol (1910) 2

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It’s that time of year, so I went looking for Christmas-themed silent movies. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was adapted multiple times. The earliest known version was directed by Walter R. Booth and released in 1901. It survives only in a five-minute fragment. A 1908 treatment is considered lost. That leaves Edison’s 1910 film as the earliest treatment that survives in a reasonably complete form. Marc McDermott is an enjoyable Scrooge, and Charles Ogle, better known as the first actor to portray Frankenstein’s monster on the screen, is Bob Cratchit. This is the film I’ve combined with my accompaniment on YouTube.
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