To celebrate our 25th Anniversary, PFA hascommissioned an original score for a beautiful recent acquisition in the PFACollection, The House on Trubnaya Square. The project director is Dennis James,renowned silent film composer and performer. The performing group, Musica CuriosaEnsemble-Dennis James, Amy Crocker, and Robert Korda-was formed to showcaseunusual instruments of the twenties both in performance and film scoring. The newscore the Ensemble will perform tonight has been assembled from original silentfilm music played in Soviet theaters in the late twenties. Dennis James will playthe piano, autoharp, marxophone, pocket clarinet, and flexatone; Amy Crocker, thecello and sound effects; and Robert Korda, the Stroh phonoviolin and soundeffects. Amy Crocker and Robert Korda both are accomplished orchestra and solomusicians based in Los Angeles. The House on TrubnayaSquare (Dom na Trubnoi). Boris Barnet's perceptive satires are filled witheccentric characters (especially spunky women) vividly captured in locationenvironments. His broadly innovate style is propelled less by traditional Sovietmontage than by robust humor and an instinctive eye for human behavior. In TheHouse on Trubnaya Square a country girl, Parasha (Vera Maretskaya), lands a jobas a servant in Moscow and gets her first taste of the middle classes when shebecomes entangled in the lives of residents of an entire block of flats. (In amovement that perhaps signals Godard of many years later, the downtrodden girlbecomes transformed when she sees a play about Joan of Arc.) An observant,essentially loving character sketch of a community that never seems to stop tocatch its breath, the film is spiced with some well-placed antibureaucratic barbsand filled with cinematic surprises, from surrealism to stop-motion, andburlesques of other Soviet stylists-Eisenstein and his crowds, Vertov and histramcars.