City Lights to show early silent films

Ballantine Hall 013 will be transported to the dawn of cinema at 8 p.m. Sunday. \nSeven short films by silent celluloid director Georges Melies will be screened along with live musical accompaniment from Phillip Johnston's Transparent Quartet. A talk by Communication and Culture professor Joan Hawkins will precede the event. The evening is free and open to the public. There is also free parking in the Ballantine Hall garage when a handbill or City Lights schedule is left on the vehicle's dashboard.\nPresented by Bloomington-based Beyond the Pale Productions and the Arts Resource Consortium, the mini-festival of Melies' work gives viewers the opportunity to see one of the early special effects pioneers.\nHawkins said Melies was one of the first auteurs to not merely "document reality," but instead use it as a "medium for exploring the imagination."\n"He was a magician and was very interested in illusion and fantasy," she said. "So he started filming some of Jules Verne's stories, and his favorite themes included things like a journey to the moon and trips into hell. It is easy to see why he's called both the father of sci-fi and the father of horror."\nMelies also was among the first to utilize fade-ins and fade-outs, stop-motion animation, double exposure and split-screen shots. All of his innovations can be seen in the seven shorts to be screened: "The Melomaniac" (1903), "The Mermaid" (1904), "The Damnation of Faust"\n(1903), "Trip to the Moon," (1902), "Hydrotherapie Fantastique (The Doctor's Secret)" (1909), "The Merry Frolics of Satan" (1906) and "Voyage Across the Impossible" (1905).\nOne of his better-known films, "Trip to the Moon" features one of silent cinema's trademark images -- a rocket ship embedded in the right eye of a facially-endowed moon\nThe fact that the Phillip Johnston Transparent Quartet will be providing a live score gives viewers "a rare opportunity to see the way they were originally meant to be seen," Hawkins said.\n"Silent films were never really shown without sound," Hawkins said. "At the very least, there'd be a piano or organ accompaniment, live music that went along with the film. In some places, there were full orchestras."\nBecause of the quartet's jazz background, Hawkins finds their orchestration to be the perfect fit to Melies' films.\n"It seems fitting to me that the films should be paired with jazz, which is a music form that traditionally makes some demands on the audience," she said. "But it also treats the audience with great respect."\nThe Phillip Johnston Transparent Quartet is composed of Phillip Johnston on sax, Joe Ruddick on piano, Mark Josefsberg on vibraphone and David Hofstra on bass. They first performed their Melies score Nov. 15, 1997, at New York City's Lincoln Center. Since then, they've brought it to such diverse locales as Florence, Italy and Frank Sinatra's high school in Hoboken, N.J.\nJohnston has composed music for film, theatre, radio and dance. He was drawn to composing music for these seven shorts because he "wanted to write for a program of shorter films, in which (he) could approach the relationship between film and music in a number of different ways."\nThe music, Johnston said, draws upon many influences, including both modern and traditional jazz, as well as classical and improvisational music.\n"One of the pieces is thematically based upon a Chopin waltz, which it transmutes into a gospel tune, a jazz tune and a ballad," he said. "Others refer in various ways to the history of film music, silent and otherwise."\nShane Graham, a graduate student and one of the co-founders of Beyond the Pale Productions, describes Johnston's music as "very playful, very intricate."\n"He never does what you expect him to do next, and that's especially true of his film scores, where he often confounds the audience's expectations." Graham said. "He makes you think about the films differently and more closely than you otherwise might." \nBut accomplishing this feat does not come easily. Johnston said the most challenging aspect of composing the Melies music was "trying to approach each film in a slightly different way."\n"The live performance of the music with film is always an insane juggling act because of the challenge of staying in sync with the films with no outside conductor, and while making multiple meter and tempo changes," he said.\nHawkins emphasizes that the free package of silent cinema and live orchestration is "a great opportunity."\n"In San Francisco, where I grew up, we'd get shows like this at the Castro Theater and have to pay $5-$7 a head to have a similar experience," she said. "This is an amazing deal"