Cube Cinema
Performance story telling; free jazz; film screenings in aid of the Borneo Rain Forest: the Cube is certainly the most Hipster venue in Bristol. It always mildly amuses me that the performance space itself looks exactly as it did back in the day when it was merely a very shabby art-house cinema, and before that (I assume) a porn club.
We are here for a screening of the German Silent Nosferatu, with live lute accompaniment. What a strange world we live in where it is possible to look at moving picture shows from one hundred years ago: and to watch them as films, as works of art, not merely as historical documents and time capsules. We'd be pretty excited if we could go back in time and attend a 1922 stage play or jazz concert, but we take this kind of thing for granted.
I assume that I have seen Nosferatu before. I think it was shown on a small TV for one of our university sci-fi society's movie nights, in the days when DVDs were called VHS. I think the Cube was showing a channel 4 TV print: the movie itself looked pristine and tinted, but the inter-titles were jarringly modern, the narrative in pseudo-handwriting on parchment, the speech in lurid green script on a black background. This took me out of it a bit; I wish they could have been a little more in period though not necessarily in German.
You've seen the film too, I assume? It's the plot of Dracula, done in Bram Stoker's lifetime and without his permission, with the London scenes relocated to Germany. All the character's have German names: Harker is Hutter; Renfield (in this version, Hutter's boss) is Knock, and the Count himself is Orlok. Orlok is quite a good name for a vampire.
It stands up pretty well. Silent film acting was stylised in a very particular way; and it is hard, in particular, not to find the scenes between Harker and his wife unintentionally funny. ("I am going to the land of bandits and ghosts" he tells her, reassuringly, before decamping to Transylvania.) Knock is completely over the top even before he is committed to the lunatic asylum. I imagine we would find contemporary stage acting just as odd if we really could see it.
But by the time we get to Orlok's castle I was enjoying the melodrama on its own terms. The peasants in the inn looking horrified when they find where Hutter is headed; Hutter smilingly casting aside the book about Ghosts, Nosferatu and Demons that someone has kindly left in his bedroom; Orlok being unable to control himself when Hutter carelessly cuts his finger with a bread knife. One or two scenes do look their age -- Orlok rising from his coffin looks like something from The Goodies -- but the iconic scenes of his shadow by the stairwell still pack a punch. Shadow of the vampire would make a good title for a movie.
I complained a while back that Metropolis (another German silent movie) was almost unwatchable; but I found Nosferatu quite compelling. I don't know if the melodramatic subject matter meant that it moved quicker than the political parable or if it was less of a test of endurance because it was simply shorter.
The selling point of tonight's evening was a life accompaniment by one Jozef Van Wissem who is apparently highly regarded in the world of minimalist lute music. What I liked about his performance is that (although it was not improvised) it seemed to be reasonably adjacent to silent film scores. I have sometimes come out of this kind of thing thinking that I have really attended a rock or classical concert which happened to have an old film running the background, but Wissem was definitely there to enhance Herr Murnau's movie. The opening scenes have a fairly quiet, even pastoral string sequence played repeatedly and even obsessively; sampled recording of ominous bird song are incorporated into the soundscape in the castle; and for the last, I suppose, twenty minutes of the movie he lays the lute aside and takes up an electric guitar. Perhaps the final scenes could have seemed corny with a tinkling piano or organ, but the hight volume heavy metal-ish riff makes the whole thing seem dark and sinister.
The selling point of tonight's evening was a life accompaniment by one Jozef Van Wissem who is apparently highly regarded in the world of minimalist lute music. What I liked about his performance is that (although it was not improvised) it seemed to be reasonably adjacent to silent film scores. I have sometimes come out of this kind of thing thinking that I have really attended a rock or classical concert which happened to have an old film running the background, but Wissem was definitely there to enhance Herr Murnau's movie. The opening scenes have a fairly quiet, even pastoral string sequence played repeatedly and even obsessively; sampled recording of ominous bird song are incorporated into the soundscape in the castle; and for the last, I suppose, twenty minutes of the movie he lays the lute aside and takes up an electric guitar. Perhaps the final scenes could have seemed corny with a tinkling piano or organ, but the hight volume heavy metal-ish riff makes the whole thing seem dark and sinister.
People often say that modern 3D epics need to be seen on the big screen; but I am sure I appreciated this ancient, rather primitive artefact because I was with an audience giving it their respectful attention.
1 comment:
"and before that (I assume) a porn club."
The building started out as The Bristol Deaf Centre (workshops and things for Teaching A Trade and so on), then was a small am-dram and rep theatre, then an arts cinema and I *think* the last thing it was before it was The Cube was a cinema/theatre/social space run by the Chinese Overseas Club (we still have a bunch of their films).
It was definitely never a porn club (not, as they say in the thing, that there is anything wrong with that...)
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