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In the 1920s and ’30s, French culture was like a kid with growing pains: both jazz music and cinema were sprouting as art forms, both involving revolutionary concepts and methods. Django Reinhardt and Stephan Grapelli were perfecting a style of jazz-guitar associated with Gypsy culture, and the films of Rene Clair, Germaine Dulac and Luis Bunuel began to cause a rumble under the surface of the country’s Bourgeosie culture.
On Saturday, the university will be rebelling against bourgeoisie society the old-fashioned way. The Hot Club of San Francisco, in collaboration with the San Francisco Film Festival, are presenting “Silent Surrealism” at the Maine Center for the Arts.
The event is a compendium of short films and live “gypsy jazz,” a frenetic yet controlled style of the music that is often laid aside by today’s audiences who prefer the more definitive jazz music of Miles Davis or John Coltrane. Similarly, the four films that will be screened are all obscure and largely forgotten, but no less important in the evolution of cinema than anything Steven Spielberg has directed.
The four directors represented are Charles R. Bowers, James Sibley Watson, Harold Shaw and Harold Muller. They were artists who worked deep in the underground of the art scene – and were, ironically, American – but made films of a certain style and substance that a handful of French filmmakers would later take to the next level.
Comparatively speaking, the most recognized of these filmmakers is Bowers, who made around 50 shorts during his lifetime and originated early forms of techniques that would later come to be known as stop-motion animation. Bits of his life story are as out-of-the-ordinary as any of his films: For example, he was apparently kidnapped by a traveling circus at age six and stayed with them for two years before returning home. Perhaps events such as this contributed to the animated free-form wildness that his films are known for, though he also drew cartoons and illustrated children’s books for some time, and occasionally acted in or solely animated his films.
“Now You Tell One” (1926) and “It’s a Bird” (1930), two of Muller’s most renowned films, will be screened. The films, like most surrealist art, are more concerned with manipulating the audience rather than guiding them along, and are more interested in presenting the rationality that lies within irrationality.
As for the music, The Hot Club of San Francisco is a quintet consisting of Paul Mehling, Evan Price, Ari Munkres, Sammo Miltich and Josh Workman. The group performed a concert on campus several years ago, but that time it was a straightforward concert; this time it is a multimedia experience. The group has been showcasing the music of Reinhardt and Grapelli and other gypsy jazz musicians for years, in the tradition of the original “Hot Clubs” that were formed in the 30s and featured exactly those musicians. The group recently approached the San Francisco Film Festival director, Greg Legat, about the idea of collaborating with the festival on a tour of screenings of early silent films being accompanied to live music, as films originally were, before cineplex and surround sound technology rendered actual musicians obsolete to cinephiles. It was then that their first venture into another art medium began.
“These are very old, silent films that not many communities are able to see these days,” says Marc Baylin, who has been managing the group for four years. “UMaine is just one of our college stops on this tour.”
When considering the precise histories of jazz and cinema, one may see “Silent Surrealism” as a subtle contradiction. Silent films were never traditionally scored to gypsy jazz, and rarely any jazz music at all. The movements of gypsy jazz and Surrealism were also never quite parallel, although the context of Saturday’s event may lead one to think so. Surrealism in film came to prominence in the mid to late 1920s and Gypsy Jazz came to prominence in the 1930s, when sound had entered the picture. But thinking too much of these clashing historical facts would lead one away from the inventiveness and well-intended experimentation of “Silent Surrealism.” Most importantly, the event is meant as both a throwback and an aberration: the old-fashioned form of a cinematic experience and a project that is completely out of line with any artistic trend at the moment, popular or unpopular. While musicians such as Reinhardt are still widely listened to and copied by musicians of today, the films of Charles Bower have been blighted out by time, their reputation crushed like a rare stone by the waves of popularity, leaving only specks of influence. But this does not mean that the music will attract more of the audience than the films will; “Silent Surrealism” is an event for those interested in cinema, 20th century art or just an unusual experience.
The show starts at 8 p.m. Saturday and, students may apply one of their two free tickets each semester to this event. For more information, contact MCA box office at 581-1755.
