EnLIVE 3 "Live Music in Silent Film"

enLIVE is returning again in January 2018 with another fascinating series of ciné-concerts. In the span of two days, enLIVE gives audiences the opportunity to enjoy some of the most emblematic films of the silent era, set to original music and performed live in the intimate surroundings of The Shoe Factory in Nicosia. enLIVE 3, which is organised on 17 & 19 January 2018, will present four silent cinematic masterpieces, which have greatly impacted and proved to be an immense transformative force in the history of cinema. enLIVE 3 is certain to be a unique and stimulating visual and aural experience for the live performance of original music by a number of talented musicians marvellously enhances the mood and atmosphere of each silent film, divulging its veiled imageries and deciphering its connotations.

Artistic Director of the project: Alexandros Mouzas

PROGRAMME:

17 January 2018

THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED (1926)
Direction: Lotte Reiniger / 67’
Original Music: Chris Davies
Live Performance: Chris Davies (a multi-instrument performance in an ‘orchestra’ of percussion instruments, xylophones, bamboo and metal flutes and electronics).

THE GENERAL (1926)
Direction: Buster Keaton / 78’
Original Music: Baudime Jam
Live Performance: Prima Vista Quartet

19 January 2018

NOSFERATU (1922)
Direction: Friedrich Murnau / 93’
Original Music: Baudime Jam
Live Performance: Prima Vista Quartet

SAFETY LAST! (1923)
Direction: Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor / 73’
Original Music: Andreas Zafiropoulos
Live Performance: Andreas Zafiropoulos (piano)

THE FILMS:

Wednesday, 17 January 2018

THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED (1926)
The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the oldest surviving animated feature film and still stands as one of the great classics of animation – witty, lively, delicate, inventive, stirring and romantic. Lotte Reiniger’s enchanting work uses intricate silhouettes made from cut-out cardboard and thin sheets of lead, an animation technique she invented, to enact a tale from The Arabian Nights. The film tells the story of a wicked sorcerer who tricks Prince Achmed into mounting a flying horse. What follows is a series of wondrous adventures. The animated figures in Achmed move against a changing backdrop of vivid colour tinting and ornate scenery, from the scene where the Prince first finds Princess Peri Banu bathing in the lake to the frightening flying goblins who spirit the sorcerer away to do his bidding. Director Jean Renoir called the film "a masterpiece" and effusively proclaimed the director "born with magic hands." Reiniger was unusual in making conventional fairy tales rather than the more experimental or political works favoured by fellow members of the avant-garde. The Adventures of Prince Achmed impresses for its exquisite craftsmanship, balletic movement, expressive romanticism, and moments of potent sensuousness and poetry.

THE GENERAL (1926)
Considered one of the funniest silent films ever made, The General is an epic of silent comedy, one of the most expensive productions of its time and it is now widely regarded as a masterpiece (the film was ranked among the ten best films in history by the magazine Sight & Sound of the British Film Institute, and it regularly appears in the lists of the greatest masterpieces of the seventh art). Based on the autobiographical book The Great Locomotive by William Pittenger, the film is set during the American Civil War and it boasts the most unremitting passages of virtuoso slapstick genius Buster Keaton ever shot as well as an unflagging momentum. The General displays marvellous technical and structural perfection, a unique combination of playful comic inventiveness and realistic romance, and nonchalant, graceful, fluid athleticism on the part of Keaton. The film sets off the adventures of Southern railroad engineer Johnny Gray (Buster Keaton), facing off against Union soldiers during the American Civil War. Johnnie loves his train ("The General") and his fiancée, Annabelle. At the outbreak of the war, he is turned down for service because he's more valuable as an engineer, but Annabelle thinks it's because he is a coward. Union spies capture The General with Annabelle on board. Johnnie must rescue both his train and his girl, and he pursues the soldiers, using various modes of transportation in comic action scenes that highlight Keaton's boundless wit and dexterity.

Friday, 19 January 2018

NOSFERATU (1922)
One of the most pioneering films in the silent German expressionist movement, Friedrich Murnau’s Nosferatu is almost unique in portraying a vampire who is not darkly attractive, but corpselike and ghastly. Even so, his dread fascination remains troubling: the hero’s wife seems repelled but also mesmerised even as she seeks to destroy him. In reality, Nosferatu is an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but it eschews the traditional role of Christian iconography of symbols, retaining only a few vestigial references, for example an allusion to the seven deadly sins. The film makes, nevertheless, a major contribution to vampire mythology: It was in this film that the vampire was first imagined to have a deathly vulnerability to sunlight. Nosferatu, like Dracula, has been the subject of numerous Freudian and sociological interpretations: The vampire is sex; the vampire is the id or animal desire; the vampire is wantonness; the vampire is venereal disease. But in making surrender rather than resistance the means of destroying the monster, Nosferatu resists allegorisation, remaining simply, unsettlingly, itself.

SAFETY LAST! (1923)
The comic genius of silent star Harold Lloyd is eternal. Chaplin is the sweet innocent, Keaton the stoic outsider, but Lloyd is the modern guy striving for success. And with its torrent of perfectly executed gags and astonishing stunts, Safety Last! is his quintessential comedy, the film that has defined his entire career, and the one that has identified him as the King of the Daredevil Comedy. The film is most remembered for its thrilling, hair-raising climax – the iconic image of Lloyd dangling from the hand of a giant clock on a twelve-story skyscraper above busy Los Angeles streets. Regarded as one of the most significant American silent films, Safety Last! not only defines the work of a top comedian and filmmaker, but it also indicates how a movie made 95 years ago can still evoke the same audience reaction as it had when initially released. The boy (Harold Lloyd) leaves his rural home to make a name for himself as a man of means in the city and to make his girlfriend (Mildred Davis) proud of him. He gets a job as a sales clerk in a big department store serving obnoxious customers, pretending that he is the manager. When his girlfriend makes a surprise visit, he has to pull out all the stops to make sure she doesn’t realise the truth.

THE MUSICIANS:

PRIMA VISTA QUARTET (for The General & Nosferatu)

CHRIS DAVIES (for The Adventures of Prince Achmed)

ANDREAS ZAFIROPOULOS (for Safety Last!)

Tickets:
€15 / €10 Concessions & members of the Pharos Arts Foundation,
Box Office: Directly from the Foundation’s website www.pharosartsfoundation.org/Tickets_online.htm or Tel. 9666-9003 (Monday - Friday 10:00am-3:00pm)