Sunday, June 23, 2024
6:30 pm Doors // 7:30 pm Movie + Music
All Ages
$12 (+taxes/fees) Advance General Admission // $17 (+taxes/fees) At The Door
Ticket purchases are final and non-refundable
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Rare screening of the iconic 1928 silent film, The Man Who Laughs, directed by the great Paul Leni and adapted from the Victor Hugo novel of the same name.
Considered a masterpiece, the film tells a heart-breaking tale that is both melodramatic and chilling, ultimately becoming a template for modern-day horror films and the legendary Batman villain, The Joker.
The screening will be live-scored with a performance featuring new work by Paris 1919, the musical collective of celebrated composer Chris Strouth and select Twin Cities musicians, in this case Natalie Nowytski (a classically-trained vocalist-turned-folk music geek who sings in 50+ languages and 12+ distinct vocal styles), guitarist Kent Militzer, and multi-instrumentalist Dave Russ.
Strouth’s work has been described as “aggressively ambient,” and this new composition promises to be a fine cocktail to accompany this dark, weird, and twisty film.
Chris Strouth’s roots as a musician and electronic artist go back to the 1980s, when he got his start as part of the punk art collective around Rifle Sport Gallery in downtown Minneapolis. Since then, he has become a producer, scenemaker, and composer of complex, immersive works, often written for large-scale ensembles or collectives such as Future Perfect Sound System and Paris 1919, with whom he has released four albums and an EP since 2011, most recently 2022's Future Archaeology.
The music Strouth creates defies easy categorization and, as with many forms of art, sticking a label on it is perhaps unhelpful — to listeners and to the music itself. Instead, it transcends genre. DJ and electronic musician Kid Koala has praised Strouth's work as "sometimes futuristic, sometimes nostalgic, but always evocative, dwelling in a perfectly focused space between tranquility and chaos. It is the type of music that is a screenwriter's dream."
Paris 1919's music can be jaggedly buzzing and sinister, ethereal and serene, melancholy and stately. There is, at times, an almost science-fictional quality that seems to blend the mechanical with the organic. There are echoes of the industrial throb of Coil or Throbbing Gristle, Ennio Morricone's film score for The Thing, Enoesque ambiance, the Red Room sequences in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, Pink Floyd's more cosmic psychedelia, silent-film innovator Georges Méliès, and more.
Still, if a genre label is needed, Strouth's emphasis on digital manipulation and sometimes dark, unsettling atmospherics congenially resonates with both modern neo-classical and ambient drone music, even if it won't fit neatly into any one box.