Novii Vavilon
USSR,
1929, 85 min
Shown in 1984
CREDITS
- dir
-
Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg
- scr
-
Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg
- cam
-
Andrei Moskvin, E. Mikhailov
- editor
-
Grigori Kozinstev
- cast
-
Elena Kuzmina, Piotr Sobelvski, David Gutman, Sophie Magarill
-
COMMENTS
Dimitri Shostokovich’s original score performed live at screening by the SF Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Omri Hadari.
The New Babylon, hailed by the Cinematheque Francaise as one of the few authentic epics of the cinema, represents the first collaboration of Shostakovich and the Soviet directorial team of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. The film’s remarkable score, composed in 1928-29, was lost from that time until it was discovered after Shostakovich’s death in 1975. Directors Kozintseva and Trauberg, who were in the forefront of the Soviet film and theater avant-garde in the ’20s, approached the iconoclastic young composer to write the film score for The New Babylon, largely on the strength of his experimental Gogol opera, The Nose. The New Babylon is the composer’s only silent film score, but he continued his collaboration with Kozintsev and Trauberg in the 30’s, notably on their “Maxim” trilogy. He also contributed memorably to Kozintev’s great Shakespeare adaptations: Hamlet and King Lear. The drama of The New Babylon is set in the 1871 Paris Commune and centers around a posh department store modeled after Emile Zola’s novel, Au Bonheur des Dames, which he modeled on a real Paris emporium, Le Bon Marche. The historical backdrop of the film is the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris and the Commune of 1871; therefore, the title, New Babylon, refers both to a department store and also to Paris and France. Shostakovich’s score, with its cacophonous cancans, languorous waltzes and liberal quotations from well-known French music, including Offenbach’s “La Belle Hellene” and “Orpheus,” as well as “La Marseillaise,” provides the already exciting film with a further sparkling dimension. The British Film Institute, which in recent years has been instrumental in the restoration of silent film classics with live orchestra accompaniment, including Abel Gance’s Napoleon, has previously mounted three performances of The New Babylon in London, several in Holland and the U. S. premiere at the 1983 New York Film Festival. All of these were under the baton of Omri Hadari, Principal Conductor and Musical Director of the London Lyric Orchestra, who is responsible for reconstructing the complete Shostakovich score from a painstaking study of the parts discovered in Moscow archives. At its Castro Theatre presentations, the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra performs the score under Hadari’s direction. Our thanks to Boosey and Hawkes Publishers Ltd. (U.K.) and G. Schirmer Inc., agents for VAAP.
Kozintsev and Trauberg also directed The Youth of Maxim (1935), the first part of a classic trilogy about a true popular hero with a score by Shostakovich, as well as The Devil’s Wheel (1926) and The Club of the Big Deed (1927), two of the most notable silent films produced by the pair in collaboration with the FEKS group—the Factory of the Eccentric Actor—which began as a futurist theater group that believed in total experimentation, excess and rebellion.
FACTOID #210
When Ginger Rogers appeared for a tribute at the SFIFF in 1984 (’sporting hair with the color and richness of whipped butter,’ wrote the Examiner), she shocked the packed Castro Theatre crowd at her 1984 tribute when she griped, ’The filthy mouths we’re hearing in films today’I won’t pay to see these movies. I’d rather stay home and make jam.’
