Imagine hearing the Lon Chaney classic The Phantom of the Opera with the metal band Razorback providing the music.
This is just one of the highlights of this year’s International Silent Film Festival. The Silent Film Festival Manila opens its seventh edition on Friday.
The annual affair, a joint venture between the Film Development Council of the Philippines and several foreign cultural agencies based in Manila, takes place from 23-25 August 2013 at the Shangri-la Plaza Cineplex. The festival this year features films from Japan, Italy, Germany, the US, Spain, and the Philippines.
It is an annual celebration of the heritage of silent film from all over the world, and, in the Philippines’ case, recent efforts to revive the craft of silent film.
As always, the film festival brings together music and film. As the chair of the FDCP, Briccio Santos, said in a statement, “Silent films were never really silent.”
Before it became possible to synchronize sound recordings with film, early cinema relied on live performances, either by a piano or even a full orchestra, to add color to the proceedings. This year sees some returning acts, such as Sinosikat (which scored the Spanish contribution last year) and Razorback (which was responsible for Italy’s Dante’s Inferno score some years back).
New acts taking part this year include Terno Recordings band Pulso and Sammy Asuncion’s Spy trio. The former will accompany the opening film, the Japanese crime film Keisatsukan (A Police Officer) from 1933.
One of the musical highlights for me is Germany’s contribution to the festival, an early 45-minute feature called Ich mochte kein Mann sein (I Don’t Want To Be A Man), which is one of Ernst Lubitsch’s pre-Hollywood silent films.
Lubitsch’s film will be accompanied by a collaborative score prepared by the Manila Composers’ Lab, a collective of new music composers and performers, and visiting composer and musician Pierre Oser, who has scored silent films in Germany and elsewhere for many years.
Another film that will make an appearance this year is Raymond Red’s Cinemalaya 2012 film Kamera Obscura, which will close the festival on Sunday. Last year, Red presented some of his remastered short films funded jointly by the FDCP and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.
This included the restored and de-colorized version of Ang Magpakailanman (The Eternity), which was also premiered at Cinemalaya 2012’s experimental program.
Kamera Obscura opened to mixed reviews at last year’s festival, although it walked away with the Best Director prize for Red, a special jury prize, and the Best Score prize.
It will get a new score by Spy at this year’s festival, and Red admitted his excitement at seeing what would become of it. “I gave them the full freedom to see what they could do,” Red told the media.
Will a new score help erase some of the critical sting it has received? We will see on Sunday night.
One film that has been getting a lot of buzz is the US contribution to this year’s festival. Last year, viewers were fortunate to catch Radioactive Sago Project’s score for Safety Last, the iconic 1923 film directed by, and starring Harold Lloyd.
This year’s contribution is no less spectacular. The Phantom of the Opera, the 1925 Rupert Julian film starring Lon Chaney in another iconic role, is the inspiration for many remakes and a certain Andrew Lloyd Webber musical from the 1980s.
“The film has been deemed culturally significant by the Library of Congress,” US Embassy cultural counsellor Kristin Kneedler told Coconuts Manila, “so it was included for preservation in the National Film Registry.”
Equally significant is that it is Razorback’s second time at the festival, and Kevin Roy, the band’s vocalist, told Coconuts Manila that their score may include the skeleton of what will be their upcoming album.
Red’s work from last year highlights the fact that we have very little traces of what was once a vibrant silent film industry here in the Philippines, a gap being remedied by the FDCP-backed National Film Archive.
However, apart from Raymond Red’s work, there are other efforts to keep the craft of silent film alive in the local setting. Every year, for instance, the UP Cineastes organization hosts the Haute Auteur silent short film competition, and these films were live-scored by acts such as Tarsius, Radioactive Sago Project, and Taken by Cars at the awards ceremony.
This is a festival for those who love film and music, and it is a chance to celebrate cinema’s heritage and music’s enduring place in Manila’s cultural life.
