A Celluloid Curio (with the Alloy Orchestra)

It'd been nearly a decade since I'd last seen the Alloy Orchestra when, last night, I attended their presentation of Wild and Weird at the Somerville Theater.

The program was 10 short films of the silent era, most little seen and made by people long gone and little remembered, but here, sweetly, given another chance to delight an audience, and with a treatment by three wonderful performance artists such as they'd most likely never received in life.

The last time I saw these fellows was in Prospect Park in 2002, when Jamie and I lived in Brooklyn. She, even then my shining star leading me to all the great movies, flashed the news that the Alloy Orchestra would be at the bandshell presenting Speedy, the Harold Lloyd film. I brought along my two roommates and we made a picnic out of it.

In Speedy, Harold Lloyd's father (or was it his girlfriend's father?) is a Civil War veteran who operates the last trolley still pulled by a horse team in Manhattan. Trains whoosh along highlines over his head, and police direct the stream of Fords that zoom past him. With the modern age pressing in on all sides, they have to find a way to protect his business, and hang on to this last shred of the city they used to know.



Yet as we watch Speedy today, of course, and we see Lloyd spin all over 1920's New York, a tour of aching nostalgia that goes from meeting Babe Ruth in the Bronx to visiting Dreamland at Coney Island, it's hard to believe that an earlier time could have been any better.

After Speedy, I was surprised to learn the true size of the Orchestra. We were sitting at quite a distance from the bandshell and I had imagined that a much larger ensemble was responsible for all of those sounds- every police whistle, every car horn, all the rattles and grinds and clattering, not to mention the melodic instrumentation, was produced by three very busy musicians.

Last night, I was much closer to the action. Their music was actually somewhat spare; it never took attention away from the films, and it was frequently possible to forget that the music was live and not simply a soundtrack. Yet it was all graceful and considered, and only occasionally indulged in a moment of "Hey, look at this!"

Yet pointing out neat things to people- things we never would have seen or noticed otherwise- is clearly what they enjoy doing. The program, co-curated by one of the Orchestra members, was like a rummage through buried treasure. One of the films had been digitally reconstructed from two shambling copies; another had been reproduced from a single known print discovered at a junkyard in Mexico. The short subjects, some more narrative and some less, flowed nicely together and evoked a carnival atmosphere. In one, a fly with its wings glued down spins tiny props in its shivering legs; in another, a demon in hell performs magic tricks; in another, a man who has overeaten dreams that his bed is flying above New York. In between films, painted glass slides were presented, reproductions of actual messages to silent era theater patrons: "Ladies, Please Remove Your Hats."

One of the best shorts was a selection from the Dream of a Rarebit Fiend series, drawn by the astonishing Windsor McCay, one of my biggest inspirations in college. In this installment, called The Pet, the husband has a dream that his wife takes in a peculiar stray animal. The animal is an adorable cross between a cow, an elephant, a dinosaur, a dog, a cat, a kangaroo, and, let's say, a horse. It looks like all and none of these animals. Full blown from McCay's mind, it is a clean fabrication of an animal that has never existed, but is drafted so naturally that you can immediately accept it as a real species. It is also very intelligent and endearing. Nevertheless, the husband feels that there's something sinister about the animal, and takes steps to destroy it.

But by far the most incredible piece of work in the collection was The Cameraman's Revenge, made in Moscow in 1912 by the puppeteer (and entomologist) Ladislas Starewicz. His story concerns a married pair of stag beetles, their infidelities, and the subsequent fallout. The entire film was made through stop motion photography of actual dead insects. I was mesmerized by the technique; the idea that the dead bodies of little creatures were made to act out scenes of human emotion, often convincingly, was at once grotesque, heart-wrenching, and even kind of humorous (and the Alloy Orchestra score played subtly to all these things).