You wouldn’t think that German Expressionist cinema and romantic Spanish language bolero music would work well together, but Jameson Price thinks it could be a perfect match.
For 19 years, Price has organized and curated The Silent Music Revival, a traveling series that pairs interesting and esoteric silent films with improvised live soundtracks from Richmond area musicians (who have never before seen the film in question). He’s gearing up for the biggest Revival yet on Sunday, Oct. 26 — an outdoor showing of the pioneering “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” at Dogwood Dell with an original live score from Miramar. The event is free, with donations encouraged.
“Because of the dramatic persuasion of both the music and of the film, it’s going to work really, really well,” says Price, who produces Silent Music Revival events with the help of the James River Film Society. “The film and the group are both very bold, and they both have very strong emotive characteristics, so I think they’re actually going to pair really well together.”
“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” new 4k restoration trailer:
Thanks to the Revival, Richmond audiences have been treated over the years to a wide array of performers, from the Low Branches to Ohbliv to Rattlemouth to Dave Watkins, providing original music to striking if often obscure silent flicks unearthed by film buff Price. The screenings originally started in his home, and have normally been held in smallish venues such as Gallery5, Shop Two Three, Basic Beer Co., and, last month, the Poe Museum. Miramar has played along before, providing music for “Limite,” a 1931 Brazilian film, in an online viral edition of the Revival during COVID times in 2020. So this outdoor performance at the Dell will literally be like going from small screen to cinemascope. “This is definitely the biggest showplace we’ve had,” the curator says.
“Jameson told us to just do what we do. We’re going to play our songs, but maybe improvise and stretch out in between,” says Miramar’s Marlysse Simmons. “I’m going to bring an extra synth.” The backing band will include Gary Kalar on guitar, she adds. “Not many people know that he designs effects pedals so we’ll no doubt let him do his thing. ”
As Miramar, keyboardist Simmons and vocalists Rei Alverez and Laura Ann Singh burst out of the music scene nine years ago with a sizzling set of Latin American bolero music, “Dedicated to Sylvia Rexach.” The disc was met with immediate national acclaim, prompting coverage from CNN, an NPR Tiny Desk concert, and performances across the globe, most notably in France and Russia. Their followup disc, “”Enter Tus Flores,” was released earlier this year, and is a more adventurous outing, with more original songs and contemporary production elements.
“I think our set will follow the plot,” Simmons says of scoring “Caligari.” “As the storyline evolves, we’ll start with songs that aren’t as intense, more lush, and as we go along, we’ll throw in more of our upbeat stuff.”
Price, who performs in the folk duo, Holy River, with wife Laney Sullivan, says that this is a formula that works. “I advise bands that they should make more than half of the set songs that they would just already play. It puts less pressure on the musicians, and it gives something to the fan base so that they’re hearing songs that they recognize, they’re connecting with them, and then it creates a new visual experience with that song. I don’t know how this happens, but there hasn’t been a time where the lyrical content hasn’t found a way to interact with the visuals.”
It will be strange to hear Miramar’s passionate, swooning duets in support of a bizarre and visually disorienting slasher film, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” lauded as one of the most influential movies of the silent era. If you’ve never seen “Caligari,” directed by Robert Wiene and written by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, you’ve probably never taken an Introduction to Cinema class. But you’ve felt the film’s influence, most notably in later film noir and horror movies. Critic Roger Ebert once called it “the first true horror film”, and described its look as “a jagged landscape of sharp angles and tilted walls and windows, staircases climbing crazy diagonals, trees with spiky leaves, grass that looks like knives.”
“It’s a movie that is known and obviously has a reputation amongst the Halloween horror community,” Price says. “But it is also a movie that I would absolutely stand by in terms of its production. It was made at the peak of the German expressionist movement, which rippled throughout cinema for decades and decades after. And so I think it’s an incredibly important film.”
It also has relevance to current times. The film includes a lot of deep, if masked, commentary on what was happening at the time politically in Germany, he says. It was an increasingly isolated world that would soon give birth to the rise of fascism, and to Adolf Hitler, who the film’s hypnotizing villain Caligari loosely resembles. “I think it reinforces that art is this expression that can give life to resistance in subtle and yet subversive ways.”
Important to Halloween season, the movie is still scary, with or without boleros. The 105-year-old “Caligari” is one of Price’s favorite horror titles — he showed it once before at Gallery5, with the psychedelic/punk band Bermuda Triangles providing the score. “I don’t know if I agree that it’s the first horror film,” he says. “I think there were films before it that could claim that, but many critics say that is and that’s probably because it’s still a very captivating film.”
The Silent Music Revival presents “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920) with live score by Miramar at Dogwood Dell on Sunday, Oct. 26th. It is part of the 68th Annual Festival of the Arts. 8 p.m. Free admission.
