Barbican Film Project (2018)
In 2018 along with other fellow Guildhall students I was commissioned to write new music for part of Lon Chaney’s silent horror The Phantom of the Opera as part of Barbican Film festival. Despite being shot in black and white, the 1925 classic oozes colourful melodrama, humour and tension, it was a delight to produce a new underscore.
For my first viewing of this, we were instructed to watch in silence with no previous underscore, which was an important but deeply eerie experience. When you watch without music you become highly conscious of the processes of film – the break between shots, the frame rate and the existence of the camera.
When you are confronted with the actors, silently gliding across the shot and reproducing a theatrical gesture on demand, you can’t help but remember that they are long gone, like spectres performing a routine. We need music to fill in the cracks between each frame, and between us – the camera – and them.
Lon Chaney plays the disfigured creature haunting the catacombs beneath the Paris Opera, who becomes obsessed with a beautiful understudy, played by Mary Philbin.
Lon Chaney was legendary for his skill with makeup, and Gaston Leroux's gothic romance The Phantom of the Opera provided him with a perfect vehicle.
An aspiring young opera singer Christine Daaé (Mary Philbin) discovers that she has a mysterious admirer intent on making her a star. Enticing her to his secret vault, he asks only one thing, that she never remove his mask. But soon, admiration turns to obsession, and her masked protector becomes her masked captor. When the Phantom (Lon Chaney) takes her prisoner, Christine's suitor, the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny (Norman Kerry) sets out to rescue her. Chaney's hideous but complex and fascinating creation influenced a century of film-makers, from Hollywood to China.
The live musical accompaniments are by composers and musicians of the Guildhall School's Electronic Music Studio.
The presentation of The Phantom of the Opera is by arrangement with Photoplay Productions and Patrick J Stanbury.
Event details here.
