How should we watch silent films now? When they were first produced and consumed, they were after all just films, not “silent” films – any more than photographs or paintings or sculptures are thought of as “silent”. Yet of course they often had improvised piano accompaniment; Gert Hoffman’s autobiographical novel The Film Explainer (filmed with Armin Mueller-Stahl) remembered the prewar time in Germany when his father was employed in a movie theatre to stand next to the screen with a pointer and literally explain what was going on. When Abel Gance’s Napoleon was revived in the late 70s with a live orchestral accompaniment, there was a new creative excitement around the idea of early cinema’s musical reinvention – we recently saw the re-release of the special edition of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin with the 2005 soundtrack composed for the film by the Pet Shop Boys.
But now an artistic group from Austin, Texas, called Silents Synced and its director Josh Frank are offering a new approach to silent cinema: showing classics to music by established stars. This one, Radiohead X Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror puts Murnau’s 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu with Radiohead’s Kid A from 2000 and Amnesiac from 2001. But I just couldn’t make friends with this fundamentally wrong-headed idea. Radiohead’s music isn’t composed for the film, it doesn’t illuminate it or intensify it or work interestingly against it; it just blares away arbitrarily alongside it. It’s just like trying to watch a movie while your next-door neighbour has their music on too loud. There are, possibly, interesting moments when an idea or image seems to chime or reverberate with the music; I worked very hard trying to isolate serendipitous touches like that. But this just seems to ignore the intentional form and structure of both film and album, turning both sound and image into wallpaper. An unrewarding experience.
• Radiohead X Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is in UK and Irish cinemas on 2 October.
