Sun 2/13-Sun 2/20
Cleveland has a seemingly endless stream of film festivals: festivals devoted to documentaries, LGBTQ+ films, Black subjects, Jewish subjects, shorts, indie films — and of course, the biggie, the Cleveland International Film Festival.
But now there’s a new event: the Cleveland Silent Film Festival and Colloquium: Music That Once Filled the Silence, which kicks off at the Hermit Club in Playhouse Square on Sunday February 13. It’s a project of five area institutions: Case Western Reserve University, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. Its focus is on the music created to accompany these pre-1930s movies.
The opening event at the Hermit Club was organized by Cleveland Orchestra violinist Isabel Trautwein. She and some of her colleagues will present a concert of work by one of the most significant composers of silent film music John Stepan Zamecnik (a native Clevelanders) and his mentor, Antonín Dvořák, with whom he studied in Prague. The concert will be led by Rodney Sauer, who is music director of the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. (Zamecnik himself began his career as the director of the Hermit Club Orchestra.)
Sauer is also involved in several other events during this festival including working with students at Oberlin Conservatory, teaching them how to research, arrange and perform classic silent film music. They’ll perform music to accompany several short films at the Birenbaum Innovation and Performance Space under The Hotel at Oberlin on Tuesday February 15. Sauer is also conducting a workshop at the Cleveland Institute of Music. And on Friday February 18, he’ll conduct a colloquium called “Silent Film Scoring for Working Musicians” at CWRU’s Harkness Chapel, which is free and open to the public.
On Wednesday February 16, the five-member Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra will accompany the classic Buster Keaton film, Steamboat Bill Jr., at Oberlin’s Apollo Theater. It’s the first of three evenings of film they’ll accompany during the festival. The other two take place at the CIA Cinematheque on Saturday February 19 (the Erich von Stroheim melodrama The Wedding March) and Sunday February 20 (the 1927 film Sunrise, with a new score by the Mont Alto Orhestra created from pieces by Zamecnik. In addition, the Cinematheque will screen the classic 1927 silent film, Wings, the first Oscar Best Picture winner, on Friday February 18, accompanied by Zamecnik’s original score.
For more information and tickets to events, go to Cleveland-Silent-Film-Festival-and-Colloquium.