The sound of a sole piano has echoed through the chamber of the Lido 2 cinema since last Thursday. At the first "Silent Film Festival in Thailand", which ends tomorrow, two musical experts in live accompaniment have enriched the soundless images projected on-screen with melodic phrasing, jazzy streaks — even avant-garde romps. Maud Nelissen and Mie Yanashita have taken turns playing along with Hitchcock's romantic dramas and German proto-expressionism, as well as Japanese and Chinese silent films showing at the festival. Their improvisatory deftness and sonic interpretations of visuals recreate the cinematic experience of an era when movies were soundless.
Accompanist Maud Nelissen performs at the Silent Film Festival at Lido.
In the past 20 years, Yanashita, from Nagoya, Japan, has performed in more than 600 silent film screenings in Japan and festivals around the world.
"My idea", she said, "is to interpret what the director wants to say in a film." Yanashita's style is supple, lively and discreet in its chromatic organisation. Meanwhile Nelissen, from the Netherlands, is a classically-trained pianist and composer who has sharpened her speciality in silent films since the mid-1990s, playing and sometimes conducting at countless screenings — everything from Russian classics to Chaplin's oeuvre to French surrealist movies.
Nelissen will accompany The Water Magician, a 1933 Japanese film by Kenji Mizoguchi, tonight at 8pm. She also played on the festival's opening night to Hitchcock's The Pleasure Garden, and last Saturday, her piano rendition of post-World War I German film Nerven was full of startling Schoenberg-like dissonance and atonal trips. Here, the Dutch pianist takes time to talk to us about the art of silent film accompaniment.
How does it work for you in each performance? How much of your playing is planned and how much is improvised?
Maud Nelissen.
For example, with the Hitchcock film [romantic drama The Pleasure Garden], it was a combination, but mostly it was improvisation. In some scenes I used a motif that I came up with before. But it depends. If you get more experienced, it's nice to get inspired by the moment on the screen and to feel the vibration of that moment.
But there are performances that require preparation. I've been invited to do a film, Die Nibelungen [a four-hour silent classic by Fritz Lang]. The film has an original score, but [the organiser] doesn't have the money for the orchestra. I could transcribe the score to a piano, but it's difficult and you can't really get the orchestral intensity on the piano line. So I have to prepare really well.
What's the relationship between your music and the images on-screen?
I try to be loyal to the actors — that's very important. But of course you're coloured; it's your interpretation of what the actors do. Usually we play [in front of the] screen, but what I want to do — in my thinking — is to play at the back of the screen, like I'm under the skin of the main characters. I try to be on the other side of the screen, breathe behind it and to play from the inside emotions. It's difficult!
What about the relationship between the history of music during the early 1900s and the history of silent cinema of that period? That was when some exciting things and the experimental spirit took place in classical music.
If you were in Paris in the 1920s and did music for Bunuels' Un Chien Andalou, it would be great to do experimental. But for Hitchcock, I think [in his early career] he was still in the music hall period; he wouldn't use Bernard Herrmann [the composer for Psycho]. I don't think so. When you play, you try to be as close as possible to the feeling of that time.
But still, I recently did a musical restoration of an avant-garde French film Rien Que Les Heures. You would expect avant-garde music with that film, but the score was very Debussy, very Milhaud. The image is very modern, but they counterpoint it with classical sound. Sometimes it's interesting to do avant-garde in very romantic films, but you have to be careful. It shouldn't be, 'Oh yes, I want to do avant-garde in a British film, it would be great!'. No, you do it only when it serves the film. You have to make the right choice, when you don't think about yourself.
You mean you have to be careful not to make your music be too visible?
Yes, not too visible, but at the same time you're not invisible at all. If you're too invisible, it becomes a pastiche. You have to go together with the image. I'd say that you have to be invisible in your visibility.
Tell me the difference between playing to Hitchcock's The Pleasure Garden and German expressionist film Nerven.
I try to be different. Nerven is more of the 12-tone and more expressionistic. With the Hitchcock film, it's more British. The beginning is a dance hall style, so I started by being jazzy, but at the end I wanted to make it stranger — but you couldn't do it too much because it's still a happy ending. There are other films for which you can develop a long plan — you start normal and you can go into the avant-garde. Hitchcock's films are more 'outside' [in terms of emotion] — he's an incredibly good filmmaker, but he's different from Russian or German filmmakers.
With The Pleasure Garden, I realised that the Thai audience wasn't familiar with silent films. So if I go really experimental, it's not good.
To play with silent films, you seem to have many styles. What's your favourite period or style of classical music?
I'm crazy about the late Romantic — Scriabin, for instance, and I like French composers, Debussy, Milhaud, that's my specialisation. I like Schoenberg and Webern too, but I'm not a specialist. I'm good at playing to hysterical films, Russian films, but I also like comedy.
What's the most difficult film to play with?
I have one film that I adore, but every time I have to play it I think, 'Oh, it's very hard!'. It's the French film Un Chapeau De Paille d'Italie [The Italian Straw Hat], by a great filmmaker, René Clair. It's a comedy, and I think comedy is the most difficult. The film is about the French bourgeoisie, but it's a criticism of the bourgeoisie in the 1900s. You have to play to the bourgeois element, the Parisian life, but then the film becomes really avant-garde and crazy. You have to be quick in your decision-making.
- The "Silent Film Festival in Thailand" will screen The Water Magician tonight at Lido Theatre at 8pm, with live piano accompaniment by Maud Nelissen.
- Tickets cost 100 baht. The festival closes tomorrow with a screening of Alfred Hitchcock's 1926 film The Lodger at Scala Theatre at 8pm, with live accompaniment by Thai composer and pianist Trisdee Na Patalung. Tickets cost 500 baht.
Mie Yanashita.
