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Visualizing Music in the Silent Era: The Collaborative Experiments of Visual Symphony Productions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2018
Abstract
In July 1922, the New York Times reported that the “encouraging little film” Danse Macabre was screening at the Rialto Theater in New York City. Directed by filmmaker Dudley Murphy, it starred dancers Adolph Bolm and Ruth Page in a visual interpretation of Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre that synchronized perfectly with live performances of the composition. While film scholars have occasionally cited Danse Macabre and Murphy's other shorts from this period as examples of early avant-garde filmmaking in the United States, discussions of the films are mired in misunderstanding. In this article, I use advertisements, reviews, and other archival materials to trace the production, exhibition, and reception of Murphy's Visual Symphony project. These films, I argue, were not Murphy's alone: rather, they were a collaborative endeavor guided as heavily by musician and film exhibitor Hugo Riesenfeld as by Murphy himself. Recast in this way, the Visual Symphony project highlights evolving approaches to sound–image synchronization in the 1920s, the centrality of theater conductors and musicians to filmmaking in this period, and the various ways in which filmmakers, performers, and exhibitors conceptualized the relationship between music and film, and the live and the mediated, in the final decade of the silent era.
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- Copyright © The Society for American Music 2018
References
References
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Boston Evening Transcript
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Boston Post
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Brooklyn Daily Eagle
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The Evening World
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Exhibitors Herald
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Exhibitors Trade Review
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The Film Daily
Google Scholar
Motion Picture News
Google Scholar
Moving Picture World
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Musical America
Google Scholar
New York Clipper
Google Scholar
New York Dramatic Mirror
Google Scholar
New York Globe
Google Scholar
New York Times
Google Scholar
New York Tribune
Google Scholar
Ogden Standard-Examiner
Google Scholar
Visual Education
Google Scholar
Wid's Daily
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Abel, Richard. French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907–1939. Vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
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Brown, Julie and Davison, Annette, eds. The Sounds of the Silents in Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Burkholder, J. Peter. “Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream in Music of the Last Hundred Years.” Journal of Musicology
2, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 115– 35.Google Scholar
Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Cripps, Thomas. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Delson, Susan. Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.Google Scholar
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Donald, James. “Jazz Modernism and Film Art: Dudley Murphy and Ballet mécanique
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17, no. 1 (2009): 25–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dulac, Germaine. “The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea.” In The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, edited by Adams Sitney, P., 36–42. Translated by Robert Lamberton. New York: New York University Press, 1978. First published as “L'Essence du cinéma. L'idée visuelle.” Cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925): 64–65.Google Scholar
Friedman, Ryan Jay. Hollywood's African American Films: The Transition to Sound. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Gabbard, Krin. Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Gaines, Jane. “Of Cabbages and Authors.” In A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by Bean, Jennifer and Negra, Diane, 88–118. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Heath, Stephen. “Comments on the ‘Idea of Authorship.’” Screen
14, no. 3 (Autumn 1972): 86–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, David. The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Koszarski, Richard. An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915– 1928. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990.Google Scholar
Levy, Suzanne Carbonneau. “The Russians are Coming: Russian Dancers in the United States, 1910–1933.” PhD diss., New York University, 1990.Google Scholar
Metzer, David. “Shadow Play: The Spiritual in Duke Ellington's ‘Black and Tan Fantasy.’” Black Music Research Journal
17, no. 2 (Autumn 1997): 137– 58.Google Scholar
Moritz, William. “Americans in Paris: Man Ray and Dudley Murphy.” In Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, edited by Horak, Jan-Christopher, 118–36. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Murphy, Dudley. “Murphy by Murphy.” Unpublished Memoir, 1966. Courtesy of the Center for Visual Music.Google Scholar
O'Grady, Gerald and Posner, Bruce, eds. Articulated Light: The Emergence of Abstract Film in America. New York: Anthology Film Archives/Harvard Film Archive, 1995.Google Scholar
Peterson, Jennifer. “Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film: Education in the School of Dreams.” In American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, edited by Keil, Charlie and Stamp, Shelley, 191–213. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Prevots, Naima. Dancing in the Sun: Hollywood Choreographers, 1915–1937. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987.Google Scholar
Saxena, Jennie, Weissman, Ken, and Cozart, James. “Preserving African-American Cinema: The Case of The Emperor Jones (1933).” The Moving Image
3, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 42–58.Google Scholar
Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Snyder, Robert. The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Williams, Tami. Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Ardolino, Amile and Kinberg, Judy, dir. Nureyev and the Joffrey Ballet in Tribute to Nijinsky. New York: Thirteen/WNET, 1981, VHS.Google Scholar
Murphy, Dudley, dir.
Danse Macabre. 1922. Disc 7. Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Cinema, 1893–1941. New York: Image Entertainment in cooperation with Anthology Film Archive, 2005, DVD.Google Scholar
Murphy, Dudley, dir.
Soul of the Cypress. 1920. Disc 7. Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Cinema, 1893–1941. New York: Image Entertainment in cooperation with Anthology Film Archive, 2005, DVD.Google Scholar