VOC Harmonic performs live scoring of 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Horror cinema has had a fascinating history, packed with political, social, and artistic facets that are intrinsic to reading the horror movie form itself. Early films like Nosferatu, The Man Who Laughs, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, are known for their abstractions from early cinema forms and conventions. As many silent films and early sound films felt simply like stage plays set to a camera, a handful of horror pictures from the early 20th century truly felt like films proper, with a film grammar established that only a camera can translate in full.
Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, released in 1920, is one such film, and on Saturday, Nov. 1, a full house at the Silence venue was treated to the proper way to view a silent film. The Kitchener-based VOC Silent Film Harmonic performed a mostly improvised score for the film; a score that integrated contemporary classical and atmospheric jazz forms to set the tone perfectly for the film’s themes.
The film, which Roger Ebert called “the first true horror film,” uses a frame narrative, one of the first of its kind in cinema. The main character, Francis (Friedrich Fehér), recounts his story to an old man, and the film’s narrative is told through this recounting.
When Francis and his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) are competing for the affection of the lovely Jane (Lil Dagover), they accompany her to a fair, where they meet the strange and compelling Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss). Caligari has a “somnambulist” named Cesare (Conrad Veidt) stowed away in a cabinet. Cesare, in his perpetual sleeping state, knows every secret and can tell any future. When Alan asks, “When will I die?” Cesare replies that he shall die at dawn, and here is where the film really picks up.
Alan is murdered as part of a string of mysterious killings with identical circumstances, and Francis and Jane follow up by investigating the mysterious Caligari. Caligari orders Cesare to murder Jane, but fails and collapses from exhaustion, subsequently dying. Upon further investigation of Caligari, Francis and the police discover that he is not exactly who he claims to be, and this leads to one of cinema’s first twist endings – Caligari is actually the director of the asylum that is being investigated. And, in turn, the entire ordeal took place in Francis’ mind, and he is institutionalized at the end of the film.
The VOC Silent Film Harmonic, the six-piece group from Kitchener-Waterloo, did an absolutely sublime job scoring the film’s music. Laying back when the narrative lays back, and picking it back up when the film does, the group, led by bassist Ted Harms, improvised on roughly-sketched visual themes from the film. Gentle guitar flourishes, played in tandem by Michael Mucci and David Hunsberger perfectly complimented the creepy harmonium/synth tones played by Neil Ballantyne and the eerie reeds of Wade Whittaker. Drummer Bradford Nowak kept the whole thing together with subtle, artful drumming that was never too sparse or too overbearing.
Traditionally, silent films were screened almost exactly like this. Without a simultaneous audio track to be synced to the images on screen, movie theatres would often gather a small harmonic of musicians to play arranged or improvised music for the audience. With this in mind, Silence and the VOC presented a silent cinema experience as authentic as can be, and just in time for Halloween, to boot.