A nearly century-old silent film is due to get a fresh soundtrack in Gibsons later this month, as an instrumentalist who once shared the stage with grunge superstars Nirvana improvises an original score.
Seattle-based cellist and composer Lori Goldston first performed impromptu accompaniment for the landmark French film The Passion of Joan of Arc in the early 1990s. A friend who owned a movie theatre in Berkeley, California contacted her with an unusual request. “She called me up and she said: someone’s coming to town and the French community kind of asked me to put something together for her,” Goldston recalled. “Her mom was in a silent film.”
The French visitor was the daughter of Renée Jeanne Falconetti, a French stage actress whose sole major movie role was the arresting portrayal of Joan of Arc in the 1928 silent film made by director Carl Theodor Dreyer. “It was kind of a big deal,” said Goldston, “and very consequential.”
Goldston performed her first improvised soundtrack for Joan at the same time that she was a touring cellist with Nirvana, fronted by grunge rocker Kurt Cobain. She has since contributed to more than 90 recorded music albums while lecturing at universities throughout the Pacific Northwest. As a composer and guest artist, she maintains an active crowded performance schedule.
“I like a big challenge and I like a lot of variety, so playing the same thing all the time is not my cup of tea,” she observed. “I like a lot of problem-solving and challenges. I like to make things really unnecessarily difficult and then have to deal with it. It makes you learn a lot that way, and you’re never bored.”
While she has improvised scores for a variety of silent films (she recently immersed herself in Eastern European music for a Yiddish movie screening in New York), Joan of Arc has been a steadfast companion. Goldston has seen the film more than 100 times, performing solo or ensemble interpretations as the film has been projected in Europe, Mexico, and across the U.S.
In preparation, she thinks about the duration of scenes and their transitions, using the language of writing (punctuation, paragraphs, and chapters) to guide her accompaniment. She incorporates somatic musical material from the early medieval liturgical repertoire, weaving in some secular references. Her stringed instrument offers its own benefits and challenges.
“[The cello] is a very adaptable instrument,” she said. “It has a very visceral quality and a very vocal sound that people connect with in an emotional way. But it’s also terrible, in a way, because it’s really brutal.” Long concert tours or extended performances exact a physical toll, demanding time to recover. Goldston swims to relax her muscles.
“The composition of [The Passion of Joan of Arc] is so exquisite, I still see new things in it all the time,” she added. The movie depicts the historical trial of Joan of Arc, which took place in 1431. Dreyer, a Danish director recruited by an early French film company, studied preserved transcripts of the trial while preparing his script. The film’s cinematography feels startlingly contemporary: it uses extreme closeups, unusual camera angles and high-contrast lighting to present Joan and her accusers with dramatic immediacy. Although the work was censored and heavily re-edited following its 1928 release, an original print of the director’s original edit was discovered in 1981.
The Gibsons performance by Lori Goldston for The Passion of Joan of Arc will take place on Jan. 21 at the Heritage Playhouse, sponsored by the Sunshine Coast Film Society. Tickets are available online by browsing to heritageplayhouse.com.
