Events | Silent Film Special
Los Angeles | June 5, 2018 | 7:30 PM
Summer is upon us and so is “Silent Salon”, our annual silent film event. Bring friends and family, make it a surprise date, or entertain guests from out of town with a true L.A. experience. Enjoy a picnic in our gorgeous, newly landscaped garden, watch the sunset over the Pacific Ocean and file into our salon for silent films with Live organ and piano accompaniment.
Following the Silent Film Special of THE ANCIENT LAW (by E.A. Dupont) on June 5th, we will honor Ernst Lubitsch featuring four of his lesser known German comedies.
We would like to thank The Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek for their support. “Before the Lubitsch Touch” was curated by Martin Koerber, Head of Audiovisual Heritage - Film of the Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum für Film und Fernsehen.
June 5: Silent Film Special
July 7: Before the Lubitsch Touch #1
July 28: Before the Lubitsch Touch #2
August 18: Before the Lubitsch Touch #3
June 5: Silent Salon Special
L.A. premiere of the digitally restored version by Deutsche Kinemathek: The Ancient Law (Das alte Gesetz)
(Dir. E.A. Dupont, Germany 1923, 128 min., starring Ernst Deutsch)
With Live accompaniment by Donald Sosin (piano) and Alicia Svigals (violin)
Presented in cooperation with the L.A. Jewish Filmfestival
The film tells the story of Baruch, the son of a rabbi in Galicia during the 1860s. Fascinated by the theater, Baruch leaves his shtetl for Vienna to pursue an acting career, against his father’s wishes. Through the love and support of an archduchess he succeeds at becoming a great classical actor. But he longs for home and is reconciled with his family, where he embraces his heritage as his father comes to appreciate the beauty of secular literature. “The movie paints a complex portrait of the tension between tradition and modernity and was made at the last moment when the future of German an Austrian Jewry still looked hopeful.” (Hannah Brown for the Jerusalem Post, 2/24/2018)
Pianist and Composer Donald Sosin grew up in Rye, NY and Munich, Germany. Since 1971 he has performed his silent film music at Lincoln Center, MoMA, the Kennedy Center, and major film festivals here and abroad. He records for Criterion, Kino, Milestone and TCM. His one-act opera, Esther, was performed at the National Yiddish Book Center. Other Jewish music includes a short children's opera, A Parakeet Named Dreidel, Yiddish folk song arrangements, and Three Psalms, which was premiered in 2009 by the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.
Violinist/composer Alicia Svigals is the world's leading klezmer fiddler and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics. She has worked with violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Kronos Quartet, playwrights Tony Kushner and Eve Ensler, poet Allen Ginsburg, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Debbie Friedman and Chava Albershteyn. Svigals was awarded a Foundation for Jewish Culture commission for her original score to the 1918 film the Yellow Ticket, and is a MacDowell fellow. With jazz pianist Uli Geissendoerfer, she recently released a recording of contemporary interpretations of klezmer music from a long-lost Soviet Jewish archive.
