The unique sound of the Alloy Orchestra will once again fill Spaulding Auditorium as it returns to Hanover tonight to accompany Dziga Vertov's silent masterpiece "The Man with the Movie Camera."
This will be the third time that the Cambridge-based trio will be performing at Dartmouth, having appeared with "Metropolis" in 1994, and "Lonesome" this past January. Their accompaniment of "The Man with the Movie Camera" has been performed in the U.S. only once before, at the 1995 Telluride Film Festival.
The Alloy is composed of percussionists Ken Winokur and Terry Donahue, and keyboardist Caleb Sampson. It is singular in its use of junkyard objects such as pie tins, truck springs, wine bottles and washboards for their percussive effects.
The result of their particular combination of sounds is very impressive. "Although they are only three men, they sound like a minimum of a dozen people," commented Bill Pence, director of film at the Hopkins Center.
"The Man with the Movie Camera," made in 1929, is one of only two existing works of the Russian master Dziga Vertov. It exemplifies Vertov's concept of the "kino-eye," his belief that the camera has all the visual possibilities of the human eye.
The film follows the cameraman, Vertov's brother, as he walks through Moscow and records everyday city life. "Life caught unawares" was Vertov's motto for his approach. This film is his demonstration of the potential of a movie camera to go anywhere, and see anything.
The audience not only sees through the eyes of the camera, but sees the cameraman setting up the camera and shooting the scene. "It's very free-association," said Pence. "It's sort of a film poem and sort of a documentary."
The Alloy's score for "The Man with the Movie Camera" follows Vertov's original notes for the music, recently uncovered in the State archives of Moscow by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. The notes describe the feeling of the music, and the sound effects that should accompany the film. Until now, however, it has been screened as an unaccompanied silent film.
"'This is one of the classics," said Pence, "but it's not the same without the music. The music tends to hold it together, to make it modern. It becomes a whole new work of art."
Winokur believes that the Alloy Orchestra and "The Man with the Movie Camera" are perfectly suited to each other. "We were really given the perfect excuse for our junk metal acoutrement," he said in a press release. "Vertov was a futurist who believed in new technologies as almost a religion. So we did a more modern soundtrack than we have done in the past."
The Alloy has become a staple of the Telluride Film Festival since it first performed there in 1993 with "Sylvester."
When they premiered "The Man with the Movie Camera" at Telluride this September, hundreds of eager viewers had to be turned away.
According to Pence, a co-director of the festival, a resident commented that he had "never seen a line this long in Telluride for anything!"
Tickets for this event are $7 and $2 for members of the Dartmouth Film Society, and can be purchased at the Hopkins Center Box Office.
