Hugo Max brings live score to horror classic in Cambridge cinema
What could be more atmospheric in the run-up to Halloween than watching one of the creepiest silent horror films ever made alongside a live improvised score?
Violinist and filmmaker Hugo Max is taking his cult London show on tour, accompanying the greatest horrors and thrillers of the silent era on solo viola.
Hugo’s soundtracks draw on the dramatic and heightened worlds of silent films, incorporating musical styles and techniques developed during the time of their conception, but are completely improvised on the night.
He has already built up a following at The Prince Charles cinema in London’s Leicester Square, where he has live scored silent films including vampire movie Nosferatu, and movies by Buster Keaton and Alfred Hitchcock.
In Cambridge at the Arts Picturehouse, he will score The Cabinet of Dr Caligari(1920) –a visionary psychodrama that features some of the most unforgettable images in the history of cinema.
“It's really wonderful to come and perform alongside Robert Wiene’s incredible film, which I think is one of my favorites of all the silent films,” says Hugo.
“I've been working with viola improvisation for a long time. It was only over the last few years that I've in particular used it to explore accompanying silent film. And this event is part of a wider tour I'm doing of the UK, which originated from the shows which I was doing very often at The Prince Charles cinema in London, accompanying some of the greatest thrillers and horrors of the silent era, which I think are still incredibly relevant thematically to our current eras.”
Explaining why the screenings with his live accompaniment have been so popular, Hugo says: “It makes it into an event. And I think particularly post pandemic, the idea of having a special event is important because all arts venues have suffered in this time, and it's been a real challenge to try and get people back into these venues, into the concert hall, but also into the cinema, as streaming really took hold in the pandemic.
“The audience that comes to the silent film screenings is so varied - it encompasses four generations, and so you have people of all ages, of all backgrounds, all interests, who aren't necessarily aware that they're coming along to what is an hour and a half solo viola recital in many ways.
“And yet, after the show, what's so wonderful is that they will come up and engage in conversations, talk about film and talk about music, how particular sounds and effects are created, and my creative process. So it's really lovely the way the border between performer, audience, film, kind of dissolves a bit.”
Max’s solo viola soundtracks are both expressive and critical readings of silent films, drawing on specific musical genres to understand the context underscoring these works. His accompaniments to German expressionist films in particular incorporate inspiration from composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and György Ligeti and reference the klezmer tradition, exploring his own Germanic-Jewish origins through the film’s lens.
Hugo says: “My great-grandfather was Austrian, and my grandmother German, and they were Jewish. They escaped in 1939 from Vienna and came to the UK, and a lot of my work as a visual artist has been exploring their life at the end, before the war, their early life in the UK, and thinking about family history and collective memory and intergenerational engagement, all of which I think are relevant to the process of scoring silent film. And as well as through them, coming closer with painters of German, Jewish origin at that time and the present, I've been aware of thinking about these films, which are so interconnected with that culture.
“I see these films as a product of their time, and particularly Caligari, which has these painted sets. Nothing has been made at all like it since. I think it's a completely singular work of art, but at the time, it was made as a response to the soldiers who were being sent off to kill and be killed in World War One, as a kind of anti-authoritarian revolutionary film. I think these random acts of violence that exist within the film, which are really difficult to make sense of within its crazy logic, are incredibly pertinent now.”
Hugo, 22, was making a short film at The Prince Charles cinema when he had a conversation about scoring movies and his training as a classical violist. This led to him being asked to come and do a show.
He says: “That show was incredibly popular, and another came, and then another. And then we started talking about other films. I started originally with the Nosferatu, the unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and it then spread out to all these other German expressionist works. My being drawn originally to the German expressionist works was happening at the same time that I was doing a lot of work with my visual art practice with my painting and thinking about my Germanic Jewish family history. So the music making and the visual making very much for me go hand in hand.”
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari tells the story of a mad hypnotist who uses a hypnotised sleepwalker to commit murders. It is considered the quintessential work of German expressionist cinema.
Hugo explains that his scores are quite different from those often used to accompany silent films.
He says: “We're very used to hearing a pianist accompanying a film, or there are original orchestral scores for some of the films, but not all. Solo viola is slightly more unconventional, and I have spent time looking through the original cue sheets of motifs for these films that survive, and the original scores. But my soundtracks of silent films are completely original. I do structure the scores in relation to the film, but it is still an improvisation in each show. It's planned up to certain points with different themes associated with different characters, but it's very important to me that each show is different.”
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, scored by Hugo Max, is showing at 7pm on Sunday, 6 October at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.
Visit the Arts Picturehouse website for tickets.
