Street Angel w/ American Music Club
Last night, as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, I saw Street Angel with live musical accompaniement by American Music Club.
American Music Club is a pretty old indie band (started in 1983!) with Mark Eitzel (who’s done some good stuff as a solo artist) that’s recently reunited. AMC did a great job with the music. They didn’t follow many of the customs of silent movie accompaniement. For instance there was singing!
The movie was surprisingly nuanced and complex for a movie of that error. I’m used to watching some of the more facetious silent movies, like Buster Keaton movies (who’s completely awesome!). This movie was much darker but still with a happy ending.
If you’ve never seen a silent movie with live musical accompaniement, I’d recommend it highly. Most of the time it’s a piano or organ. The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto has a Might Wurlitzer organ with silent movie Wednesdays during the summer.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:19 pm
[…] like this pretty much every year. I saw Jonathan Richman do Phantom Carriage last year and American Music Club do Street Angel a few years back. Those have both been pretty great audio/ visual experiences and I expect The […]
April 1st, 2009 at 11:08 pm
[…] Something really cool that the San Francisco International Film Festival does each year is have a current band compose a score and provide live accompaniment to a classic silent film. Past years have included Black Francis, Jonathan Richman, American Music Club. […]