Scores don’t carry right tone in silent Chinese films

To score or not to score, that is the question. Sunday’s
screening of silent Chinese martial arts films at the James Bridges
Theater, showed that sometimes it’s better not to score.

The experiment in cultural cross-pollination started with the
idea to bring a local DJ to score the rare 70-plus-year-old films
being screened. The UCLA Film and Television Archive brought DJ
Anne Litt, who is better known as the mixer of beats on the 89.9 FM
KCRW show “Weekend Becomes Eclectic.” For those who
couldn’t buy this idea abstractly, archive programmer
Cheng-Sim Lim offered up a pre-show justification.

“Some people thought I was thinking outside the
box,” Lim said. “Actually I was very much thinking
inside the box.”

This characterization requires an examination of this so-called
box. Yes, Chinese martial arts films have been known to interject
scenes with western classical music and pop standards, but this
music appeared in appropriate places; for example, using the
violent music in Stravinsky’s “The Rite of
Spring” during fight scenes in Zhang Che’s “The
One-Armed Swordsman.”

Lim’s idea worked sometimes. When the Red Heroine entered
the screen flying through the sky in “Red Heroine,” DJ
Litt found a trumpet-like fanfare, a techno-cousin of John
Williams’ “Superman” theme. When we entered the
sexy harem of a local warlord, DJ Litt played some bump-and-grind
hip-hop.

But more often, the show deviated into long stretches of music,
which ignored the emotions on screen. Playing upbeat dance music
when a young girl is consoling her dying grandmother does not do
justice to the dramatic arc of the film. A chunk of people left
after the first film in a double bill, disappointed by music so
inappropriate that it reduced the films to a random video project
at a dance party. Of course, that interpretation is interesting,
but it is also disruptive. Those who came to see a movie ended up
with a sonic barrage (some even asked for a refund).

Silent films were accompanied by pianos, organs, orchestras, but
not dance-party turntablists. The music asked people’s bodies
to shake but a movie requires that human bodies sit relatively
still. The most successful stretches of music were in fact the
places where the pounding beat dropped off, leaving an entrancing
sound world of electric buzzes and clicks that could graft onto the
emotional life of the film’s characters.

The films themselves were wonderful, having some fight scenes
that still resonate and generate applause. The courtyard fight
between two women in “Swordsman of Huangjiang”
resembled a similar one in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon.” As evidenced in that scene, the films noticeably
featured women warriors fighting in male-dominated worlds, which
offers a model for female-empowerment but at the same time makes
these women exotic social outsiders.

Lim should be applauded for her efforts to both show these rare
films and to present them in an unorthodox way. However, screenings
would benefit from accompanying music that has some semblance of
subtlety and appropriateness.