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O ne of the simplest demonstrations that a ﬁlm studies instructor can under- ta

O ne of the simplest demonstrations that a ﬁlm studies instructor can under- take in the classroom involves familiarizing students with the difference between ﬁlm and video projection. From 2004 to 2006 I taught an introductory ﬁlm history course in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University covering cinema’s ﬁrst ﬁve decades. While approximately twenty-ﬁve percent of the students taking this course were enrolled in the department’s ﬁlm production major and were actively creating their own 16mm ﬁlms, the remain- ing students were largely taking the course out of personal interest or to fulﬁll requirements for other degrees. As such, the majority of students were not nec- essarily familiar with the technical differences between ﬁlm and video, nor their variability in image quality. In order to demonstrate this distinction, a compari- son was undertaken using the German expressionist ﬁlm The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Germany, 1919, Robert Weine). Starting from the beginning of the ﬁlm, a DVD print was shown on screen via a data projector, which ran for about ﬁve minutes. The same opening scenes of the ﬁlm were then projected via a 16mm projector, and this is the format through which students viewed the entire ﬁlm. This demonstration subsequently led to discussions in tutorials about the differ- CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES VOLUME 17 NO. 2 • FALL • AUTOMNE 2008 • pp 77-98 BLAIR DAVIS OLD FILMS, NEW SOUNDS: SCREENING SILENT CINEMA WITH ELECTRONIC MUSIC Résumé: Les diverses circonstances qui entourent le visionnement d’un ﬁlm dans un cours de cinéma inﬂuencent profondément la réaction des étudiants face à l’œu- vre en question. Que ce soit l’information fournie au sujet du ﬁlm avant sa projec- tion ou la qualité de la copie utilisée, les choix de l’instructeur peuvent avoir un impacte déterminant (et parfois imprévu) sur la réception du ﬁlm. Cet article retrace les expériences d’un instructeur qui a tenté d’identiﬁer les divers effets sur les étu- diants de la musique d’accompagnement des ﬁlms muets. Au cours d’un vision- nement en particulier, une musique d’accompagnement électronique a été très efﬁcace au près des étudiants. Cela a mené à une série d’expériences pédagogiques visant à déterminer si les étudiants répondent aux ﬁlms muets plus favorablement si l’accompagnement est moderne plutôt que traditionnel. Cette recherche a été entreprise non seulement pour répondre à mon propre besoin d’améliorer mes méthodes d’enseignement, mais aussi pour fournir un modèle à d’autres instruc- teurs qui veulent diversiﬁer leurs façons de présenter des ﬁlms muets. ences between the ﬁlm and video image, with many students noting that they had not necessarily been aware of the difference in image quality until it was pointed out to them. One problem with this teaching demonstration, however, was the fact that the 16mm print of Caligari had no musical soundtrack, something that the stu- dents had become accustomed to having with their silent ﬁlms during the semes- ter. This factor would ultimately lead to subsequent demonstrations testing the notion of whether modern electronic music could be used to enhance student engagement with silent ﬁlms in the classroom. I decided to ﬁll the silence of the Caligari print by synching up a CD during the screening (a senior colleague at another institution occasionally played jazz albums in such a situation). The album selected to accompany Caligari was Songs of a Dead Dreamer by DJ Spooky, featuring music that might be generally described as “electronica” by some, or “trip-hop” by others (my students used both of these terms to describe the music, for example). The terms largely refer to music that has been created by a Disc Jockey (DJ) through combining pre-existing musical samples together and/or crafting electronic tones into rhythmic structures–criteria that informs the deﬁnition of electronic music for the purposes of this essay.1 With its dream- like/surreal soundscapes, Songs of a Dead Dreamer was well suited to the expres- sionist imagery presented in Caligari, and the album’s title served as a thematic link to the ﬁlm’s depiction of somnambulism. The music was an overwhelming success with the students, who noted that the music and imagery often became synchronized, whereby when the scenes in the ﬁlm changed so too did the music similarly change in its beat or tempo.2 The success of the screening led to others of its kind in the same semester. The Soviet montage ﬁlm Man With a Movie Camera (Soviet Union, 1929, Dziga Vertov) was accompanied by a new score from The Cinematic Orchestra (which had been speciﬁcally composed by the group for the ﬁlm in 2001).3 This was fol- lowed later in the semester by the short French surrealist ﬁlm Ballet Mechanique (France, 1924, Ferdinand Leger), accompanied by the ﬁrst two tracks from elec- tronica artist Amon Tobin’s Chaos Theory album. Anecdotally, the feedback I received from both my students and my teaching assistant indicated that they actually preferred to hear modern music while watching silent ﬁlms, because it allowed them to engage with the ﬁlms more fully than if a more traditional piano, organ or orchestral score had been used. This strong anecdotal feedback ultimately led to the need for more objective evidence regarding students’ musi- cal preferences for silent ﬁlms in subsequent semesters. This type of positive student response to a silent ﬁlm is certainly ideal, but is not always achieved in the classroom. Jan-Christopher Horak observes, for example, that students do not always fully appreciate silent ﬁlms, particularly when shown a poor print: 78 BLAIR DAVIS Teaching silent ﬁlm courses on a regular basis, I’m one of the ﬁrst to admit that the advent of DVDs has made my job easier. Trying to con- vince students that the ﬁlm they are watching is not only a cinema clas- sic, but also as sophisticated and modern as any ﬁlm made in the sound era, is a particularly hard sell when the print in question is a ‘dupey,’ ﬁfth-generation 16mm reduction from the 35mm nitrate original, and dead silent to boot. When shown DVDs produced from restored master materials, and including a full orchestral score or at least piano accom- paniment, students are much more willing to give silent ﬁlms a chance.4 Here the issue is that students will respond differently to a silent ﬁlm depending on a variety of factors, such as the quality of the print selected. Instructors make numerous choices concerning the way in which the class is conducted and mate- rials are integrated. Many of these choices, such as which print of a ﬁlm to use, may seem relatively simple, but they can often have larger, unforeseen implica- tions. One illustration of this involves Edward T. Hall’s notion of proxemics—the relationship of social space to culture. In The Hidden Dimension, Hall deﬁnes proxemics as the “use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture,”5 noting for instance that the arrangement of furniture in a room is typically determined by cultural preferences. Hall examines in particular how ﬁxed seating arrange- ments will create a remarkably different social dynamic than when individuals are able to move their seats, with conversation being more prevalent in the latter case.6 Instructors will typically notice a difference in the quality of discussion in a room with ﬁxed seating, such as rows of desks or tables, as opposed to sitting around a table with moveable chairs where eye contact is readily accessible. If a simple choice like seat arrangement can affect classroom dynamics, instructors OLD FILMS, NEW SOUNDS 79 Amon Tobin performing a live DJ set. must also be aware that the decisions they make in terms of how ﬁlms are pre- sented can also have important consequences for students. Since viewers regularly respond to ﬁlms emotionally as well as cognitively, it is only natural that a student’s emotional response can occasionally overwhelm their interpretations of a ﬁlm. As an instructor, I have noticed that those students who describe being bored by a given ﬁlm often cannot offer much in the way of interpretation of that ﬁlm during group discussions, and that consequently they often perform poorly when writing about the ﬁlm. Torben Grodal argues in Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film, Genres, Feeling and Cognition that “cog- nitive and perceptual processes are intimately linked with emotional processes within a functionally uniﬁed psychosomatic whole.” He sees a “systemic relation between the embodied mental processes and conﬁgurations activated in a given type of visual ﬁction and the emotional ‘tone’ and ‘modal qualities’ of the expe- rienced affects, emotions and feelings in the viewer.”7 Grodal’s theories concern- ing the interrelationship of cognitive and emotional responses to visual stimuli can be extended to auditory cues, as the act of perception is rarely unconnected to other bodily senses–hearing typically being primary among them. This combi- nation of visual and auditory stimuli serves to create an environment in which the act of perception normally occurs, hence emotional responses may be activated by one or more elements of that environment. Such conceptions of spectatorship are indicative of what Joseph D. Anderson and Barbara Anderson uploads/Geographie/ cj-film-studies172-davis-silent-cinema-electronic-music.pdf