Silent Film and the Art of Live Accompaniment
Jeff Rapsis provides live musical accompaniment to silent films.
By Thomas P. Caldwell
PLYMOUTH — Silent films that have survived from a century ago and now are shown at the Flying Monkey Movie House and Performance Center in Plymouth still can speak to audiences today, according to Jeff Rapsis, a musician who provides live accompaniment to those movies, most of which were made from the early 1910s to the late 1920s.
“It’s a combination of something fixed in time from long ago — you know, the movie — and something new and contemporary today that reflects today’s tastes,” Jeff says. “There’s not much I can compare it with in any other art form, where two time periods sort of work together to create an experience for today.”
When someone hears about silent movies, they often think of “the old rinky-dink silent movies you might have seen at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor in the 1960s,” Jeff says, but, “It’s a real art form that flourished for only a short time, and we’re only now discovering how universal and timeless some of the work that they did is. It still speaks to us across all the ages, and I think it will continue to do so in the same way that the great paintings and plays from Europe and Greece still speak to us.”
Jeff, who partnered with Alex Ray in bringing silent films to the Flying Monkey when it opened in 2010, had become interested in old movies before he was in junior high school.
“I was a weird child growing up,” he said. “I always had a thing for the older movies; I don’t know why. And in junior high, I had a music teacher who was a film collector also — and this was like in the days before home video, so to have a film collection was kind of an unusual thing. He had 16-millimeter prints of all these older films, and he would bring them in and show us Charlie Chaplin films during study hall, just to keep the kids kind of quiet and occupied.”
While most students did not seem interested, Jeff was fascinated by those films from earlier generations. He began going to the library to find out more, and began purchasing his own films. He did not pursue a career in film or music, but said, “The whole film thing kind of stayed with me like a low-grade infection for all these years.”
Jeff was in his forties when he became interested in making music again, and he began providing accompaniment to silent film screenings, saying it seemed to fit his musical abilities. He learned that there were a lot of opportunities: the Palace Theater in Manchester, Red River Theaters in Concord, the Somerville Theater in Davis Square. Today, he accompanies about 100 shows a year, using an electronic keyboard that allows him to conjure up the texture of a full symphonic orchestra, “including percussion and drums and everything I need”.
He reflects, “It’s weird. I collaborate with dead people, and I try to do it in a way that celebrates and channels what they were trying to do. I don’t do it to show off … I don’t want people to hear my music and not watch the movie. I want it to all work like the people making that movie would want to work it. And it’s best if it can cast a spell over an audience in a way that doesn’t happen when there’s talking going on in a movie. A silent film is like a ballet, almost, and the music enhances that. At its best, it can create kind of a trance with audience members, and you get so absorbed in it that the music almost disappears. And the best compliment I get afterwards is when people say, ‘Oh, I forgot there was some guy doing the music live.’”
Jeff says that, having started about 20 years ago, he has “built it up to where it’s kind of my big side hustle. I really enjoy being able to go around and present these films and do live music of my own creation all around New England.”
While based in New Hampshire and playing mostly in northern New England, he also has played at the Kansas Silent Film Festival and, in May, plans to collaborate with a museum in San Francisco.
Only about 20 percent of the old silent films made musing nitrate film survive today, the majority of them having succumbed to fire or decomposition. No one in those days was thinking about preserving the films for viewing a century later.
The films that survived have been copied onto safety film stock and, in more recent years, converted to high-resolution digital copies.
“We use essentially DVD or Blu Ray-level media projected at the Flying Monkey on the big screen,” Jeff said. “Film prints, if you can get them, are so old and battered up that they don’t do a good job at showing the films at their best. A digital restoration, where they can clean up a lot of the artifacts and the scratchiness and stuff like that, it’s kind of a revelation to see the film as it would have been seen originally in theaters 100 years ago.… At its best, it looks like an Ansel Adams photograph come to life.”
There are occasional surprises, when a film thought to have been lost is discovered in someone’s possession. One example that Jeff cites is a 1927 Lon Chaney film, “The Unknown”.
“It’s a terrific film. It’s one of his best roles,” Jeff says. “But it was missing for many years because no prints had survived, and nobody knew if they’d ever see it again. It turned out the Cinémathèque Française had a print of it, but it was labeled ‘inconnu’ outside on the cans, which means ‘unknown’, so everybody thought it just meant, ‘Oh, we don’t know what that film is — unknown.’ … And it’s now a favorite film that we’ve got on digital that really is great for Halloween, because it’s really creepy melodrama that takes place in a circus in which Lon Chaney has no arms, and it’s just so weird that we wouldn’t have had it at all if it hadn’t been found.”
Another example is a 1921 film in the National Archives, “Strength Is The Way” — a single copy of the original film remained.
“Nobody famous in it, it was just an ordinary Paramount release in 1921 and it played in the theaters, was successful, and then it never got released again,” Jeff said. “It’s of interest to us because it’s one of the few films actually set in New Hampshire.”
The story is set in the fictional town of Hampton Center. A Maine film buff paid to have the film scanned, and Jeff has a copy.
“It’s a wonderful window into what Hollywood thought of New Hampshire back in the 1920s and, of course, it’s what you'd expect,” Jeff says. “We’re all a bunch of local hicks. You know, yokels. The police constable has a horse and buggy, and he’s a comical character. But it’s a great window into small-town America from 100 years ago, with a New Hampshire flavor to it.”
Upcoming shows at the Flying Monkey are Harold Lloyd’s “Speedy” on May 15; “The Sea Hawk” with Errol Flynn on July 17; Buster Keaton’s “Seven Chances” on Sept. 18; and Mary Philbin and Conrad Veidt in “The Man Who Laughs” on Oct. 23.
“Speedy” is Harold Lloyd’s final silent feature, serving as a tribute to New York City, baseball, and the idea that nice guys can finish first, and features an extended cameo by Babe Ruth.
“The Sea Hawk” starring Errol Flynn is a swashbuckling historical drama on the high seas, about an English noble sold into slavery. He escapes and seeks revenge.
In “Seven Chances”, Buster Keaton inherits $7 million on the condition that he gets married by 7 p.m. that day. He has to find the girl of his dreams while being pursued by an army of women eager to marry a soon-to-be millionaire.
“The Man Who Laughs” is a silent film adaptation of Victor Hugo’s historical novel about a man cursed with a permanent carnival-freak-like grin on his face. Conrad Veidt’s makeup inspired the look of Batman’s arch-nemesis, the Joker.
Jeff says he tries to find films offering something they have not presented before.
“I like to challenge myself to come up with music for a film that’s new to me,” he said, “but we want to do stuff that is going to be entertaining to people. So comedy is a big thread, but we try to do some dramas and some thrillers and adventure films and occasionally a documentary, like ‘Nanook of the North’. They had all these genres back even at the beginning, even science fiction. … So I plan the schedule kind of like a chef plans a menu, for variety and for interest. I guess, too, we want to show films that people are going to enjoy and not show clunkers that nobody wants to come see and probably didn’t want to see 100 years ago.”
For a schedule of films at the Flying Monkey, go to https://www.flyingmonkeynh.com/mec-category/film, and for Jeff’s own website where he lists all of the silent films he is featuring, see https://silentfilmlivemusic.blogspot.com.