Music cultizing film: KTL and the new silents

Abstract

This paper is interested in the way new music redefines old silent films, altering their cultural value and cult status, as well as engaging new audiences. The recent renaissance of silent film has been led by the rediscovery of live music, and has opened up the possibility for silent films being recontextualized and made cult objects through new music by uncompromising musicians who aim to make them into something different. This process has developed apace in recent years due to the fragmenting what were once distinct areas of culture, the expansion of film into venues beyond the cinema, and the possibility of release on DVD. The KTL version of The Phantom Carriage vividly illustrates the possibility of the status of music and musicians redefining films as cult objects, altering their sense of cultural value and interest, allowing the rediscovery and renewal of films that are the best part of a century old.

Keywords::

• music
• silent film
• live event
• DVD
• historicism
• elitism

Notes

^1. Indeed, Ian Conrich (2006, 115) notes that cult films have similarities with film musicals.

^2. Silent films have spawned a wide-ranging and successful industry in recent years, with tours of screenings with live music and international festivals, such as Pordenone in Italy, which embrace a sizable number of screenings with live music. There is a degree of vertical integration, with films being toured with musicians and then released on DVD. One flourishing ensemble, the Alloy Orchestra, even has their own ‘sister company’ called Box 5 who restore film prints to be used by them and others. DVD releases have allowed for multiple soundtracks for the same film, sometimes, but not always, stemming from live performances of music to a film screening.

^3. Concert locations include Carnglaze Caves in Cornwall, Grasmere village hall (2005), the Scillonian club on the Scilly Isles, the Czech Embassy in London, the Monaco Hotel on Canvey Island (which was broadcast on BBC2’s The Culture Show), on TV show Later With Jools Holland (BBC, February 2008) alongside Cumbrian wrestlers and the London Bulgarian Choir, Berwick village hall in Sussex (2011), Jodrell Bank Observatory (2011), the CERN physics lab in Geneva, the Centenary Gala for Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman in 2006 (where Prince Charles was guest of honour), on the Great Wall of China, the Chelsea Flower Show, the Natural History Museum in London, and on an island in the Arctic.

^4. It is worth remembering that the phenomenon of isolated scores on some DVDs can make a sound film into a profoundly new experience through promoting the background score at the expense of dialogue and sound effects.

^5. However, there also can be this degree of fragmentation in cult film circles. For instance, Daniel Herbert (2014) discusses cult video stores exhibiting ‘taxophilia’, an obsession with meticulous categorization of minor sub-genres or film types.

^6. This appears to work contrary to the established way of dealing with silent films as historical objects that require ‘authentic’ music from the era of their first distribution.

^7. O’Malley is far from a common rock guitar player. Sometimes billing himself as ‘Soma’, as well as projects with musicians he has collaborated with artists including Italian performance artist Nico Vascellari, French theatre director Gisele Vienne, Belgian film-maker Alexis Destoop, and American sculptor Banks Violette.

^8. Although the term ‘avant-garde’ is still most often associated with art culture, cultural commentator Greil Marcus (1992, 108) used the term to describe British ‘postpunk pop’ in Rolling Stone magazine in 1980.

^9. Jane Giles (1995, 44) discusses interaction between avant-garde film-makers and more ambitious musicians from rock and pop backgrounds.

^10. Some reviews were scathing. The Fortean Times’s erudite reviewer David Sutton (2008) noted of KTL: ‘… they shouldn’t have bothered.… [the score] is positively distracting, leading this reviewer to watch the film in glorious silence’.