3 Questions With...The Alloy Orchestra
For the sixth year, Sunday morning at the MFF belonged to the three-piece Alloy Orchestra, as they used their musical talents to breathe delightful new life into a silent classic. This year's lucky movie was Dziga Vertov's 1929 Man With a Movie Camera, a wondrous, almost playful look (in a decidedly Soviet way) at life in the Soviet Union. Streetcars hurtled down the track, orchestra musicians played their instruments, a baby was born...all to the pounding, propulsive beat provided by the keyboard and percussion of the Alloy. If, every year, the festival did no more than bring these guys to Baltimore, it would be enough.
After their performance, percussionist Terry Donahue took a few minutes to answer questions about how three guys, an electronic keyboard, some cymbals, a bass drum and a bunch of unlikely melodic objects -- including a bedpan -- make silent films seem downright cool. (By the way, Donahue prefers the term "junk percussionist." OK by me.)
How do you decide which films to compose scores for?
It's a rather complicated process. For the last 20 years now, we've been working with the Telluride Film Festival. They know so many people that have ideas about what we should do. We collaborate with them, and everybody throws us ideas. But ultimately, it's what will work for audiences. Not just film-festival audiences; it can't be so obscure as to just play film festivals, and it can't be so well-known as to just play general audiences. It's hard to find that line.
And then we want something that has a really good print, either a recently restored or really sharp-looking print. People at film festivals demand that sort of thing.
And then, ultimately, it's access. Can we get ahold of and rent this film and take it on tour and be able to use it for the next five to 10 years? All those things come into play when deciding on what we're going to do.
Photo by Chris Kaltenbach
Do you feel like you're reviving an art form, or injecting new life into an art form?
A little of both. We try to play within the spirit of what we think they did back then. Most of these things either didn't have full scores at all, or by the time they got out of the major cities, they weren't playing them anyway. So whoever happened to be in the orchestra, or the piano player or the organist or whoever it was, would play whatever they thought (the score) should be.
In a lot of ways, we get to have a head start. We get to rehearse and compose to it. But we try to stay within that spirit, while never necessarily looking specifically backwards for our musical inspiration, we're trying to bridge the gap between now and then.
Is there a film that you haven't done yet, that you've really got your sights on?
I actually haven't seen it, but we've done in the last two years, two Josef von Sternberg films, Underworld and The Last Command. Each of those films won one of the very first Academy Awards, Underworld for Best Writing, they called it then, and The Last Command, Emil Jannings won the first Academy Award for Best Actor.
The only other remaining silent that von Sternberg made was The Docks of New York. Even without having seen it, knowing his work, and knowing that is the third one, it would make a nice trilogy.
