Filmharmonia in Performance

In 1996, to celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary, PFA commissioned an original score for a beautiful film in the collection, The House on Trubnaya Square, which is reprised tonight. The project director is Dennis James, renowned silent film composer and performer. The performing group Filmharmonia - Dennis James, Amy Crocker, and Robert Korda, who recently accompanied Aelita at PFA - showcases unusual instruments of the twenties. The score Filmharmonia will perform tonight has been assembled from original silent film music played in Soviet theaters in the late twenties. Dennis James will play piano, autoharp, marxophone, pocket clarinet, and flexatone; Amy Crocker, cello and sound effects; and Robert Korda, Stroh phonoviolin and sound effects.

(Dom na Trubnoi). Boris Barnet's perceptive satires are filled with eccentric characters (especially spunky women) vividly captured in location environments. His broadly innovative style is propelled less by traditional Soviet montage than by robust humor and an instinctive eye for human behavior. In The House on Trubnaya Square a country girl, Parasha (Vera Maretskaya), lands a job as a servant in Moscow and gets her first taste of the middle classes when she becomes entangled in the lives of residents of an entire block of flats. (In a movement that perhaps signals Godard of many years later, the downtrodden girl becomes transformed when she sees a play about Joan of Arc.) An observant, essentially loving character sketch of a community that never seems to stop to catch its breath, the film is spiced with some well-placed antibureaucratic barbs and filled with cinematic surprises, from surrealism to stop-motion, and burlesques of other Soviet stylists - Eisenstein and his crowds, Vertov and his tramcars.

Errata

In our last issue, we mistakenly credited Alexander Rodchenko with designing the Martian sets for Aelita. Although it is mentioned in more than one book, upon further investigation, we have ascertained that there is no clear evidence that Rodchenko was directly involved in the film's design.