Still from L’Inferno
Underground Film Series curator Richard Jermain notes why music is vital to the cinematic experience, particularly with silent films, as exemplified by 1911’s hallucinatory L’Inferno.
On October 19, Montopolis is returning to IU Cinema to do a live score of the first ever feature-length horror film L’Inferno. Based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, the stories of fear, damnation, punishment, and justice are universal, and the film itself stands the test of time. Surely, the visual feats are something to marvel at, with complex tricks of scenery and imaginative special effects that rival Gustave Doré’s original illustrations of Hell in The Divine Comedy. Yet the impact of the film will surely be due to its music.
The modern film is a reconstruction. Parts of the film have been lost at various points in its exhibition history, either as casualties of damaged film, neglected archives, or censorship of its depictions of nudity. More recent renditions have also occasioned new original scores. L’Inferno tends to invite experiments with the format of a silent film score. Since the original written score by Raffaele Caravaglios was lost, new releases have instead featured live score performances by Tangerine Dream for the 2004 restoration print and an electro-acoustic score by Italy’s own Edison Studio followed in 2011. L’Inferno was even included as a sampled snippet in Kenneth Anger’s Crowley-magick-inspired Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), for which Electric Light Orchestra’s Jeff Lyne provided music. With such radically divergent performance possibilities setting the tone for the film’s imagery, it becomes interesting to ask what exactly is the relationship between a film and its sound.
Half the experience is sound, even with silent films. Silent films are so-called because they do not have a synchronized audio track with character dialogue or foley sound effects. But they are not really silent. In limited cases in the early history of film recording, you could, for instance, watch a hand-cranked peep show on a Mutascope for the sheer spectacle of seeing real-life action appear in the viewer. Generally speaking, though, silent films were not silent at all, but were screened along with live music that mirrored the emotion and narrative beats. If you change the music, you can change the whole film. Sound is at least half of a film, not just as context for the image but as a force that provides the image with its gravitational pull. The director Danny Boyle has said that sound is 70 to 80 percent of a movie. David Lynch calculates the balance even higher, saying that sometimes sound is 100 percent the impact of a given scene.
Would The Shining be as iconic in its menace without the chilling soundtrack? According to parody edits on YouTube of Kubrick’s iconic horror film, music greatly impacts the emotional intensity of films. Sickly sweet ukelele jingles can evoke romantic summer comedy tones from the same images that could otherwise slot into a more ominous trailer cut. In the words of director Jordan Peele, “The difference between horror and comedy is the music.” Peele should know, not only as a horror aficionado but an avid student of film. How would you produce a follow-up to a film as iconic as Candyman (1992)? A trope-dependent genre like horror is already at risk, but a remake of a well-loved horror film is doubly in danger of staleness. To make the issue more complicated, the original featured a score by Phillip Glass that had its own release as an album. It makes sense why they tapped sound artist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (aka Lichens), whose hallucinatory score guides you into the images of an upside-down city that seem quite literally to grow out of the mist. If you don’t nail the sound on that opening scene, even the wonderfully shot images just seem audacious. But they become an upside-down world through the score. This is a golden era of music in film. Cult composers and sound artists are getting the chance to lend more unique and visionary impulses to storytelling in cinema than ever before, showing there are still new registers of emotional storytelling that can be opened up through score.
Montopolis performing their score for L’Inferno (photo by Sunday Ballew)
My own discovery of silent film is recent. As a PhD student in a cinema studies program, it is my own secret shame that I get intensely bored at the sound recordings prepackaged with most silent film DVDs (and I’ll take that secret to my grave). I had seen only a handful that resonated, particularly due to their live musical impart. At the Tampa Theatre I saw the films of Buster Keaton with live organ music on the Mighty Wurlitzer. It did more than imbue the experience with nostalgic charm (though it did that as well). It let me focus on the experience instead of wondering if I was seeing the film the “right” way that historical audiences may have enjoyed.
At a time when internet viewing makes films seem always available and infinitely repeatable, a film like L’Inferno is a fresh view of how mutable those experiences actually are, and how wildly we can play at expressing new possibilities with the material. With a live score, the experience is quite literally never the same twice, and is best experienced live. Montopolis do not just add freshness but with their ritual cloaks, dark stage personas, danceable grooves, and psychedelic slant on chamber music, they are bringing so much fun to the film score, it is downright sinful. Beware!
L’Inferno will be screened at IU Cinema on October 19 as part of the Underground Film Series, accompanied live by the indie chamber music group Montopolis.
2021’s Candyman will also be screened on October 30 as the closing event of the Cinema’s conference Blockbuster Futures.
Richard Jermain is a fan of horror films, experimental media, and eerie soundtracks. Richard is also a PhD student at the IU Media School, a musician, and possibly a doppelgänger sprung from the Black Lodge.