Bruce Loeb on Piano This energetic avant-garde extravaganza represents a culmination of the experimental workshop FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor), organized by two self-styled "engineers of the spectacle," Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. FEKS sought a distinctively modern idiom in the still infant art of cinema; thus in sets and costume, photography and editing, and most of all acting, their work eschews even the scent of the old or the expected. Which is not to say that FEKS did not recognize its collective influences. The story of The New Babylon is set in the 1871 Paris Commune and centers around a posh department store modeled after that found in Emile Zola's novel Au bonheur des dames, which in turn satirized the circus of consumer fetishism represesented by the Paris emporium Le Bon Marché. The extroverted acting style that FEKS developed pushed away feelings (theirs and ours) in a kind of pre-Brechtian carnival of alienation; caricature replaced character. But the inspiration for the photography came from the impressionists- Manet, Degas, Renoir. There are some magnificent scenes shot in fog, shadow and moonlight. The rhythms set up from the "choreography" of shots approach those of ballet in this film that has been called "the danse macabre of the Second Empire and Paris Commune." Bruce Loeb's accompaniment is inspired by the original Shostakovich score and based on Shostakovich works for piano.