My latest silent film upload with my accompaniment is the 1920 The Mark of Zorro, starring Douglas Fairbanks. It’s one of the most libertarian films of the silent era, presenting a masked hero who fights against oppressive rulers in Spanish California. He wears a mask, appears when he is most needed, and has a secret identity as a rich but timid caballero. It’s obvious that he was part of the inspiration for Batman. The film was Fairbanks’ first role starring as an action hero.
As usual, the accompaniment is my improvised music, played on a Roland EX-50. For this movie, I wanted to sound a bit Mexican, so I did some research. It led to a wonderful discovery: the Spanish scale, which oddly enough is also the Jewish scale. The common source is the Sephardi Jews of the Middle Ages. I started noodling in that scale and, olé! It’s a tricky scale to use when creating harmonies; there’s no proper dominant chord. With some practice, I was able to weave between major, minor, and Spanish modes. Also, I tried to sound like a guitar in some scenes, as if I were a storyteller accompanying myself.
My first try at recording the music ran into a weird problem. To record my accompaniment, I watch the movie on my laptop while feeding the keyboard output through a mixer into the computer and capturing it with a sound recording application. Then I move the sound files to my Mac and combine them with the video in iMovie. When I put the files together, the lengths of the sound segments didn’t match! They started in the right place in the video but ended too soon. It took a while to figure out that the video player on the laptop had somehow been set to play slightly faster than normal. A minute of footage took about 55 seconds to play.
That means I had to record the whole thing over after fixing the playback speed. Every time I accompany a movie is different, so once I deleted the first set of audio files, that version was lost forever. Call it practice.
The Mark of Zorro is a fun movie with a strong message of freedom, and I tried to reflect both points in the accompaniment. I hope you enjoy it.
You did very well with this; you’ve definitely built up some stamina over the years. Your techniques were varied and effective. I was impressed by your creativity. Several times I would’ve sworn it was a guitar.
We forget how subtle and nuanced these earlier films were, because they had to be. Egregious typos in the opening cards were distracting. Lots of varieties and scope, both comedic and dramatic–for the male characters, of course. For the women, not so much scope. Still, a fun film, and you treated it recht.
“…with it’s warmth, it’s romance, it’s peaceful beauties…” Oh, well. :)