The
Nantucket Film Festival and the Dreamland are proud to welcome back the Berklee
Silent Film Orchestra (BSFO) for a live performance of their new,
original score to Universal Pictures’ The
Man Who Laughs (1928). NBCUniversal itself has commissioned
Berklee to create the original score recording for a brand-new 4K restoration
of the film, the first time a major Hollywood studio has engaged the students
of a college or university to score one of its features. The Man Who Laughs will be the fifth
original Berklee score the BSFO will have performed for the NFF at the
Dreamland.
90 years after Victor Hugo’s story
of human cruelty and the redemptive power of love first captivated global film
audiences, Universal Pictures’ The Man Who Laughs, a melodrama
embued with a penetrating darkness, returns to the screen. Roger
Ebert has called the film "One of the final treasures of German silent
Expressionism.” Its shadowy exteriors, the carnival setting, and the
demonically misshapen "hero” — the ackowledged inspiration for DC
Comics’ The Joker — made director Paul Leni’s The Man Who
Laughs something entirely new to American cinema, and the foundation upon
which the classic Universal horror films would be built.
Conrad Veidt (The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari) stars as Gwynplaine, a nobleman's son who is kidnapped
by a political enemy, and then is mutilated by a gypsy "surgeon" who
carves a monstrous smile upon his face. Finding shelter in a traveling
freakshow, he falls in love with a blind girl (Mary Philbin, The Phantom Of the Opera), the one person
who cannot be repulsed by his appearance. As years pass, the hand of fate draws
Gwynplaine back into the world of political intrigue. He becomes the plaything
of a jaded duchess (Olga Baclanova, Freaks),
and his enemies renew their efforts to control him.
About
the BSFO
Described by film critic Leonard Maltin as “nothing
short of thrilling," the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra (BSFO) is
dedicated to composing new, original scores for silent feature classics, and
performing them live-to-picture. Based at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, in
the world’s first undergraduate degree program in film scoring, the
student orchestra has composed this new work, and will
perform it as an ensemble, under the leadership of Berklee Chair
of Film Scoring Alison Plante, and Assistant Professor of Film Scoring Peter
Bufano. The BSFO’s seven student composers each conduct the 12-piece
film orchestra in a “reel” of the film, passing the baton, in a small spectacle
of musical synchrony and virtuosity, live-to-picture.
To date, the BSFO has scored and performed eleven iconic silent
features, including F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, Faust, and The Last Laugh, Clarence Badger’s It, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Buster
Keaton’s Our Hospitality, E.A.
Dupont’s Piccadilly and Varieté, Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera, and Harold
Lloyd’s Safety Last! and The Freshman, each of these
commissioned by the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s Sounds of Silents® program.