Sat 7/11 @ 2PM
The Cleveland Silent Film Festival & Colloquium present another classic at the downtown Cleveland Public Library’s Stokes Wing Auditorium. The story will be familiar to high school students who had to slog through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1950 novel The Scarlet Letter (who may also have scratched their head at Taylor Swift’s weird reference to it in her 2008 song “Love Story). The 100-year-old 1926 version, directed by Victor Sjöstrom, start Lillian Gish, then one of the screen’s biggest stars, as Hester Prynne who becomes an outcast to Puritan society due to her illegitimate pregnancy and struggles to find redemption.
An original score will be performed by the Cleveland Photoplayers, directed by Eric Charnofsky. It will include music by John Stepan Zamecnik (1872-1953), a Cleveland-born composer who wrote music for silent film (although not for this one). “When The Scarlet Letter was released in 1926, MGM sent out an approved music cue sheet— a list of scenes identifying the music to be played in each one, some of it from the classical music repertory, some composed specifically for silent films,” they tell us. “That cue sheet has been preserved and it serves as the basis for Charnofsky’s compilation score, but some of MGM’s suggested cues have been lost or are unavailable, giving Charnofsky more creative leeway.”
The afternoon starts with a reception at 2pm, a lecture by silent film expert Jonah Horwitz at 2:30 and the film screening at 3, followed by a talkback with the musicians Lillian Gish was not available.
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