*smalldrumroll*

[glinda]

Hello! I'm glinda and I'll be your host this week. I'm planning on posting about silent cinema tomorrow so I thought I'd garner your thoughts on the subject.

How do you feel about cinemas doing live musical accompaniments to silent film showings? An essential part of the proceedings? Take it or leave it? Utterly pretentious and off-putting?

Also restoration of silent films, which films are you longing to see restored to their former glory and which should have been left to moulder? Should they try to restore the original colour choices (tinting and toning etc) or is early colour experimentation best forgotten in favour for a crisp black and white?

Comments

[kareila]

I like live musical accompaniment because that's How It Was Done In The Day. Canned soundtracks are okay too, as long as they're tasteful.

I've only seen two well-known, long-form silents - Metropolis and Battleship Potemkin (both with live performance of the original scores in at least one instance). So I'm really not qualified to opine on what other films should be restored! And I didn't even know about early experiments in color - I thought all colorized classic films were the fault of Ted Turner. :)

[glinda]

(really belated comment response, I know, I'm sorry)

I really didn't know anything about early colour experiments until I saw Phantom of the Opera which is full of tinting and then randomly there's a scene in the middle in what is clearly fledgling Technicolor and was internally going "who has attacked this film with colour!" Only to be researching something entirely different about the film and find out that no, it was original colour.