Devil in details of film score

Boston band backs silent Kung Fu flick

Steve Penhollow

The Journal Gazette

If you go
What: The Devil Music Ensemble presents “Red Heroine”
Where: Cinema Center Tech, 1600 E. Washington Blvd.
When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Tickets: $15; available at the door

Seventy years after the last movie of the silent era was produced, the Devil Music Ensemble found improbable success doing a job that presumably died with the silent era: providing musical accompaniment for silent films.

As you can probably guess, the Devil Music Ensemble doesn’t play pipe organ or piano rags. It instead brings these films back to life with experimental rock, a genre so different from what the films’ creators knew that they may very well have labeled it devil music.

Devil Music Ensemble will bring its latest project, “Red Heroine,” to Cinema Center Tech on Saturday. “Red Heroine” is a surprise on many levels. It is a silent film from a little known golden age of pre-Communist Chinese cinema. It survives despite the destruction of many such films in the Cultural Revolution of the ’60s. And finally, it’s a Kung Fu film.

Devil Music member Jonah Rapino says it is surprising to see how similar “Red Heroine” is to modern martial arts fare. “The pace is definitely slower,” he says. “But it is amazing to see all those clichés we take for granted in Kung Fu films. They did not come from the ’70s or even the ’60s. They came from the ’20s. “It has a hermit who teaches the hero Kung Fu,” Rapino says, “outrageously bad villains, flying effects, magical smoke effects, reverse jumping stuff. …”

Rapino says the ensemble first saw the film as part of a UCLA-sponsored martial arts retrospective in 2003. They immediately set about trying to secure it for one of their tours. “We failed miserably for two years,” Rapino says.

Why?

“We don’t speak Chinese,” he says. The film is owned by a Chinese company called Poly Asia, Rapino said, and the Boston-based ensemble could not make its intentions clear. Luckily, Rapino ran into a friend with the Asian Community Development Corp. of Boston. The friend was helping organize an Asian film festival and she said to Rapino, “Why don’t you do live accompaniment for a silent martial arts film at next year’s festival?” Rapino says he quickly exclaimed, “OK, we’ve been trying to do this for years.” The Asian Community Development Corp. got involved, and the deed was done.

The Devil Music Ensemble will take the 94-minute film to 34 cities on the current tour.Rapino says the group hasn’t decided its next move. “We’ll have a number of months trapped inside a van to talk about that,” he says.

spen@jg.net