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Silent Film Concert “The ancient Law”
3 May @ 20:30 - 22:00
Rheinbach, Church St. Martin
8:30 pm
Info:
General
Here’s the translation of the text to English:
Germany 1923
Director: E. A. Dupont
Length: approx. 135 minutes (without intermission)
New musical score for organ, Jewish chant, percussion, and glass harp by Wilfried Kaets
Cast: Henny Porten, Ernst Deutsch, Ruth Weyer, and others.
Short and Sweet:
In the middle of the 19th century, the rabbi’s son, Baruch, decides to leave his Galician shtetl against his father’s wishes to become an actor.
He first joins a traveling theater company, where Austrian Archduchess Elisabeth Theresia takes a liking to him and uses her influence to secure him an engagement at the Vienna Burgtheater.
Baruch succeeds in becoming a celebrated and successful star. The “Romeo with temple curls,” portrayed by Ernst Deutsch, wins the heart of the Duchess.
This opens the path to assimilation, but it is a rocky one, forcing him to choose between his traditional faith and values and his new environment, resulting in painful decisions.
Baruch returns home, where his childhood love, Esther, has been waiting for him. He marries her and takes her to Vienna.
His father, Rabbi Mayer, is horrified by this life and disowns his son…
When he later attends a performance of Don Carlos with his son, he is deeply impressed by his son’s acting talent, sees it as a grace from God, and forgives him.
The story contrasts the (faith-based) views of different generations and professions (e.g., the deeply religious rabbi versus the world of actors, which he believes to be sinful), as well as the prejudices of country and city (a small Jewish shtetl versus Vienna’s big city life), and the racist prejudices of the other actors against “the Jew.” These conflicting worlds stand symbolically for the necessary tolerance that humanity requires.
The film’s newly restored version, based on old censorship cards, was first premiered at the Berlinale in February 2018.
From the Film-Kurier No. 244, October 30, 1923: “Dupont succeeds in making the atmosphere of the very different worlds of this film visible: the ghetto milieu, separated by an almost insurmountable wall from the world outside, and this world itself, vividly brought to life through 1860s Vienna, which is carried by the rhythms of Johann Strauss’ waltzes, where the Burgtheater represents the epitome of all art.”
Musical:
The music is a new composition that draws on the cine-historical approaches of silent film music from the 1920s. It combines new sound colors of organ and percussion with old Chassidic and Yiddish chants. This is reflected formally through the use of the ethereal glass harp, as well as in the actual musical score, which presents a contemporary composer’s approach without attempting to replicate old models. This results in an exciting balance of “old images” and “new sounds,” which do not simply run contrapuntally alongside or against the film, but instead create a dramaturgically coherent interplay, thus giving special weight to the highly emotional subject matter.
The instrumentation reflects the extraordinary nature of the theme: concert organ, Jewish cantor (tenor), and large percussion ensemble, including the rarely heard glass harp.