On Wednesday, January 10, I’m going to try something new: presenting two short silent movies on Zoom with live keyboard accompaniment. This will be at 8 PM Eastern US time. It’s going to be an experiment; Zoom has all the components necessary, and I’ve tried them out, but performing for a live (well, real-time) audience always brings surprises. I’ll post the link here a couple of days before the event. User capabilities will be locked down so that Zoom bombers shouldn’t be able to do anything more than be annoying in chat, so sharing the link will be OK. (But I’ll still ask not to share it on Facebook or Xitter; no sense pushing my luck.)

For this one I’ll use my free Zoom account, which limits the event to 40 minutes. If it goes well, I may revive my paid account to allow more time. Or maybe I’ll learn how to use Twitch. The movies will start about 5 minutes after the event opens, since the time will be tight.

Update: After some experimenting, I’ve decided Twitch is a better platform for the purpose. The audience can’t do more than type into chat, so I don’t have to worry as much about who shows up. The presentation will be on www.twitch.tv/madfilkentist, and you can follow me on Twitch if you’re so inclined.

The program will be two short movies of the early silent era: Edison Studios’ Frankenstein and George Méliès’s The Impossible Voyage.

Friends are welcome to publicize this event. I’d prefer that you link to this blog post, wherever you might have gotten here from.

Frankenstein dates from 1910. Wikipedia lists it at 16 minutes in length. The version I’ve downloaded from the Internet Archive is a bit shorter, probably because of a faster frame rate rather than missing scenes. It’s a very loose adaptation, more fantasy than science fiction and more psychological drama than horror. Charles Ogle played the Monster over 20 years before Boris Karloff. Like Karloff, he managed to make this hideous creature sympathetic. Scene tinting is used to set appropriate moods.

The Impossible Voyage is a kind of sequel to Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon. This 1904 movie concerns a group of audacious explorers. Their first attempt at running a car over the Swiss Alps ends in a crash and a hospital stay. But they try again, with a full-sized train. It goes up the mountain and then keeps going, bringing the crew to the Sun. (Fortunately, it has a refrigerator car to protect them from the heat.) The movie doesn’t try to make sense; the point is the wild visuals. It’s about 20 minutes long.

When I accompany silent movies, I improvise the music as the film progresses. My previous appearances have included movies at the Arisia and Boskone science fiction conventions, as well as quarterly silent movies at the Plaistow, New Hampshire library. My next in-person movie will be Phantom of the Opera on January 19 in Plaistow.

Caution: These movies have significant flicker, which may distress viewers who are prone to seizures.

This will be your chance to see a silent film presented as it was intended to be — with live accompaniment — without leaving home.