The actor’s mouth moved, but nobody could hear his voice.
Instead, the audience at Kiggins Theatre heard live musicians perform movie scores as three silent-film comedies played on the big screen Sunday afternoon.
“A lot of the music is completely unknown,” said Rodney Sauer, who arranged the music for the show. “We’re playing it sometimes for the first time in decades.”
In the early 20th century, watching silent films with live music was “something that used to be done in almost every town in America,” Sauer said.
During the show, he conducted the group and worked the piano while four members of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra — on the clarinet, trumpet, violin and cello — played along.
Sauer is from Colorado, where he’s a part of The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. The group resurrects music from old silent films and writes scores based on that music to accompany classic movies.
On Sunday, the event included short comedies, each about 20 to 30 minutes long. The show started with the 1921 film “The Goat” starring Buster Keaton; then the audience saw the 1921 short “Never Weaken” starring Harold Lloyd. Following an intermission, they watched the final film, a 1926 movie starring Charley Chase called “Mighty Like a Moose.”
During “The Goat,” the music slowed, or picked up its pace, or became menacing, at just the right times as Keaton’s character fled from police and citizens after being mistaken for an escaped criminal named Dead Shot Dan.
The audience laughed during the opening scene as Keaton accidentally stood behind two store mannequins while waiting in a bread line, and failed to notice that the line had moved on without him. They laughed again as Keaton watched a man find a lost wallet full of cash on the street, and Keaton frantically began rummaging around, unsuccessfully, to find another one. In his excitement, he threw a horseshoe behind him, striking a police officer in the head.
As Sauer put it before the show, the film basically follows Keaton on a very bad day.
A new experience
About 175 people came out to the event, which was part of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s chamber music series.
Vancouver resident Kibbey Rock has been to many Vancouver Symphony events, but had not seen the orchestra members do anything like this.
“The whole performance was fabulous,” Rock said after the show. “The musicians were incredible. … I didn’t even realize it was musicians playing until I saw them up there. That was just amazing that they coordinated all that.”
It wasn’t all that difficult to pull off for the Vancouver Symphony players. Clarinetist Igor Shakhman said Sauer got into town on Friday, and the group rehearsed on Saturday and Sunday before the show.
“It’s just fun,” Shakhman said, adding that he was a fan of Keaton’s physical comedy.
Sauer said he will be back at Kiggins on May 15 to conduct music for the full-length Keaton film “Steamboat Bill Jr.”
