City Reels: Vancouver’s Independent Cinema Guide

From the First Format War of Cinema Comes a Rare Treat

by Christian Vakenti

I remember the first Betamax VCR in our home. It was a top loader, weighed a good 50 pounds and had a remote control - on a 12 foot cable. After powering it on, it took a moment to warm up, followed by a brief period of important sounding clicks and whirrs before voila - we could watch the one tape we had available at the time - Robin William’s Popeye.

You had to order Beta cassettes through a catalogue because there was no such thing as a video rental store yet. But I and the other neighbourhood kids didn’t care. After a complicated process of mashing buttons and tuning dials, not unlike arming a hydrogen bomb we thought, you could record Spiderman on this thing. And for that we figured the $1200 price tag my father paid was well worth it.

I called my father a couple weeks ago, it being Father’s Day and all, and we got to talking about redundant formats. Laserdisc, 8-track, etc. “Still got it,” says my father.

“What?” I ask.

“The Beta. Still got it. Got Popeye too.”

My father, who never throws anything away. Ever. “Dad, you’re kidding. Does that thing still work?”

“Nah, tapes completely degraded. Olive Oil looks terrible, just terrible.”

“Well dad, Shelley Duvall was never a looker…but why do you keep it?”

“Maybe someday someone will rescue Beta and…restore it!” he gruffs hopefully.

This is a wish common to many film fans around the world. The older the format, the fonder and more unrealistic the wish. Until one studio with deep pockets and an appreciation for art came along and started restoring the oldest films in existence.

“Paramount Studios are the hero of the silent film world,” declares Ken Winokur, director of the Alloy Orchestra. “They have a wonderful catalogue of silent films and are very actively restoring them. But they are the exception.”

“Other works are literally rotting away in their film canisters. It’s the same old story, of a studio used to making $100 million on a picture, not wanting to invest in these smaller draws.”

Shame, that. But Ken and his two musical compatriots who make up the Orchestra are dedicated to exposing new audiences to the beauty of the silent era as it was meant to be enjoyed - avec musical accompaniment.

“We’ve been doing this for 20 years,” says Ken. “Our first show was Metropolis, in Boston. We only had a couple weeks to do it, but we knew right from the start - it was a revelation - this powerful being created from the combination of 35 millimetre film and a live orchestra.”

“Since then (showing silent films with a live orchestra) has become a major medium. There were only a couple people doing it when we started, but after over 1000 Alloy shows around the world we’ve seen many more new groups spring up.”

Alloy employs a proprietary blend of traditional instrumentation mixed with the unconventional.

“We do have a bedpan; it’s funny, it’s not one of the more useful instruments but over 2 decades it’s become the absolute image of our ensemble,” laughs Ken. “I started doing junk instrumentation 30 years ago; I heard Terry Donahue (fellow Alloy member: junk, accordion and vocals) in another band doing these absolutely amazing things with a big steel pipe as his primary instrument. I thought, ‘It’s so amazing that someone could be so musical with such a device’.”

The Alloy Orchestra is looking forward to playing Vancouver again after a 10 year absence.

“We’ve played there 2 or 3 times. We’re excited to return. And indeed the venue couldn’t be better. I must say Vancity Theatre have clearly been treating audiences to the best in the world of film. They’ve done our job for us by educating audiences and making fabulous films available to them.”

Ken says he spends the majority of his time researching, looking for new restorations and writing the scores for them. For the Vancouver show, Ken’s chosen his current favourites.

“The Black Pirate - the most beautiful print I have ever seen in my life. This film is the very first feature length colour print, done in 2 strip Technicolour. It’s lush and saturated with somewhat surreal colours.”

“Underworld - it’s interesting that von Sternberg had a major career as a silent film director and was one of the few who made a go of it in the talkies. Underworld is the first high budget film ever made and is also the first gangster movie ever made. Well, there’s some argument there, there may have been one that came out a week earlier. But it’s certainly influenced every gangster film that followed.”

“And Man with a Movie Camera - a totally amazing film that wrote the book on modern editing styles. It was not know what the musical accompaniment was to have been, until a discovery was made in Russian archives of the director’s original notes. It was translated for us; a real treasure trove - story board descriptions of idea and styles of music. He had studied music, you know - noise music. Which is very much what we do. Working with sound objects not normally thought of as instruments.”

For anyone who considers themselves a student of cinema, these restored masterpieces with live orchestra are a real and rare treat. As formats evolve and leave behind their technological dinosaurs, it’s pleasing to revisit the ones which were particularly effective or moving.

But I find it hard to imagine a performance 60 years hence, whereupon a bulky machine is revealed at the foot of the stage and a small black cassette is held aloft for the crowd to see and hush as one, “Oooh… Beta!”

Sorry, dad.