The Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre has announced the first annual Silent Film Festival with original live music performed for classic movies each Thursday in May.
With the support of the Idaho Commission on the Arts, Idaho Humanities Council, and private sponsors, KPAC has commissioned local composers Dylan Champagne, Ruby Fulton, Liam Marchant and Spencer Cuppage to produce new music for timeless classics from the silver screen era. Our festival planners and composers have been working since November to provide an exceptional lineup of films that range from melodrama to surrealism, horror and comedy.
Each Thursday in May, The Silent Film Festival will run with film screenings at 7 PM and talkbacks with the musical artists Backstage after each performance. General admission tickets are $15 for each film or $50 for a pass that includes all performances. Student tickets are $10. The purchase of a film pass guarantees backstage access to talkbacks with the composers and performing artists after each show.
Series Events:
May 4: Dylan Champagne opens the festival with Victor Sjöstrom’s psychological melodrama, The Wind (1928), featuring a new score for string quartet and live electronics. In her most harrowing role, Lillian Gish stars as a woman who comes to a wrangler’s outfit on a bleak Western expanse, seeking shelter from the storms.
May 11: Ruby Fulton continues the series with an original score for three keyboards and other surprises that recontextualize Jean Cocteau’s surrealist fantasy, The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète 1930). The film is a puzzle box that defies easy summation: a male artist crosses a threshold into a world of memory play, symbolism, and eruptive creativity.
May 18: Liam Marchant leads jazz-rock band Pumice Pocket in a tightly plotted, original arrangement that matches every beat and canted angle of Robert Weine’s expressionist horror, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari 1921). A carnival act turns deadly when a sleepwalker haunts the city at night.
May 25: Spencer Cuppage concludes the festival with a new piano score featuring jazz improvisation and a modern rhythm section to complement Buster Keaton’s superlative comedy, Sherlock Jr. (1924). Stony-faced Keaton stars as a movie projectionist who tumbles into a dreamworld, imagining himself a famous sleuth in the movies.
Grace Giger can be reached at [email protected]