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Movie showing mixes old, new art forms |
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By Jim Wise : The Herald-Sun An old movie gets a new twist in Cary this weekend, when the Devil Music Ensemble plays for "Big Stakes." "Big Stakes" is a silent western, made in 1922. The Devil Music Ensemble is a three-man band, formed in 1999. The two come together in the form of an original musical score, which the band plays live as the movie rolls on screen. "It's just a wonderful marriage of art forms," said the ensemble's electric violinist, Jonah Rapino. "It works so well." "Big Stakes" is an obscure comedy that movie critic Hans Wollstein, author of "All Movie Guide," calls "a true rarity." Its re-scoring is the latest project of Devil Music, which is making a career out of musically interpreting silent films. "There are a couple of different reasons," Rapino said during a telephone interview from the band's headquarters in Boston. "One is the obvious tradition that has died and is slowly coming back. Various groups are starting up this art form again. "The other is the wonderful blend of music and video. ... People watching our film actually forget there is a band playing. It just becomes like this unison experience." Devil Music Ensemble is a band with various "incarnations," as Rapino put it. Consisting of founding guitarist Brandon Wood and drummer Tim Nylander along with Rapino, the band plays assorted electric guitars, lap steel, vibraphone, electrified violin, percussion, keyboards and vintage analog synthesizers. With all that, it plays as a rock band, East European folk group, country-western combo, chamber ensemble and theater house band -- as well as playing along with motion pictures. This last began when Wood saw the Jean Cocteau movie "Le Sang d'un Poete" three years ago, Rapino said. "He thought it would be neat to have it projected while we were playing, so we got up there and started interacting with the film." That worked so well, the band tried another movie, and then another. To date, it has scored eight pictures, ranging from surrealist projects by Man Ray to the 1919 horror classic "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari." Devil Music gave "Big Stakes" its first outing on March 5, and promptly took it on tour. "They just got in touch with us," said Christy Meyer of Cary's Madstone Theater, where "Big Stakes" will play at 4 p.m. Sunday. "We pretty much just got an e-mail from them, interested in using our space for the performance." Directed by Clifford S. Elfelt and starring J.B. Warner and Elinor Fair, "Big Stakes" tells a tale of a Texan who falls for a Mexican senorita who is also pursued by a dashing Mexican officer. Their competition for her comes down to a contest of jumping beans, which the Texan loses. He goes back to Texas and saves his hometown girl from the Ku Klux Klan -- a plot twist that some film historians interpret as a counterpoint to D.W. Griffith's pro-Klan silent epic "Birth of a Nation." "We had been doing 'Caligari' pretty extensively," Rapino said, "and since one of the incarnations of our band is country-western, we thought it would be neat to do a western." To avoid paying for rights, the band needed a picture in the public domain, which limited the selection from the start. Finding a few that were available on video, the band members watched a dozen or so. "This was the only one we thought was any good," Rapino said. "It's really fast-paced, doesn't waste time with long closeups of the eyes. The good guy doesn't get the girl, it has the Ku Klux Klan ... all these issues of race and gender mixed up in this genre of western comedy." |
