IMC Film Festival Q&A: Vin Calianno

Posted in ARTS to Film to Previews by Joel Gillespie on Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 2:00 pm

The IMC Film Festival is tomorrow and Saturday (and it's FREE), and Kristiana Burtness will have a full preview tomorrow, but we'll whet your appetite today with a couple of Q&A's with filmmakers whose work will be featured at the festival.

Vincent Calianno is a grad student at the U of I, and is a composer and media artist. He wrote a new score to the 1920 Robert Weine film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (you can view the film below with a completely different score) several years ago while he was a student at Oberlin College. His score will be performed live Saturday night at 9:30 p.m. while the film is projected. He was kind enough to answer some of my questions by email.

Smile Politely: Making a new score for an old silent film, and performing it live while the footage is projected is not something I've heard of before. What inspired you to work with old film footage? What in particular drew you to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?

Vin Calianno: Well, it's kind of something not too many people do these days, I guess. I know of a few orchestras/performers/composers who specialize in performing either new or pre-existing scores for the silent cinema, but yeah I agree, there's not much of it out there unless you're around a major city or anything. On the other hand, I cant think of many filmmakers who do silent cinema either, I mean Guy Maddin is an example of someone who does — but even that too is rare. Its a shame though, film is meant to be screened — its a social thing — so the marriage of live music/sounds and film is a great idea for a social occasion. Its definitely a lot more intimate than sitting at home watching a DVD.

For me, I've always been interested in film for as long as i can remember. My dad had a super-8 camera when I was a kid, and my grandfather has 8mm films he shot that span all the way back to the early '30s. So watching these films as a kid, of course silent, may have inspired me somehow to be attracted to silents and to filmmaking in general. So far, I've done three films and currently working on two more (both of which I am making). Caligari came first in 2000. in 2003-04 I did a score for Cark Theodor Dreyer's 1927 La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, which has been getting played a lot recently too. In fact there was a performance of that here a few months ago as well. I also did one Hollywood film — which was a completely different experience than doing silents. The two I'm working on now are for a cellist friend in New York — it's going to be some kind of cello-opera thing and a piece for the JACK Quartet. So they will be film accompanied by music — or perhaps the other way, music accompanied by film.

Smile Politely:  Could you explain your process for composing the score? How was it different than writing other types of music? Is it something that came together quickly, or was it a longer process?

Vin Calianno: I was asked by the film series at Oberlin College in 2000, where I did my undergrad, to do a score for a silent film on their series. I picked Caligari mostly because I knew the film and knew that I could pull something together really quick and have the score rely heavily on certain musical styles, appropriations and allusions. I actually wrote the score pretty quick, I think in under a week and finished it a day or so before the premiere. The process of writing was pretty simple: I watched the movie, marked down the times that important events occured and scored around that. The instrumentation I chose, violas, cellos and basses, I think could (in a sense) reflect the 'starker' nature of the film — plus that instrumental combination sounds 'dark' to begin with. With other silent cinema scores I've done, particularly Jeanne d'Arc, it was a much longer, more arduous process. Both of those films are roughly the same length, but it took about two years of pretty steady work to write that, versus the week it took to write Caligari.

It's a completely different mindset altogether to write for film. If I were composing a chamber piece, or piano work or whatever, I can pretty much develop ideas and concepts separate of any other stimuli, in other words, i can write a piece of music that is free to develop any way I choose. With something like film, you're kind of locked down to very concrete timings and story arcs. Also, for the most part, the music is subservient to the film — it follows the film, nuances the film, colors the film — and sometimes there is always that point where the music is given that chance to come to the fore.

Smile Politely: According to your site, you performed this score late last year, also. What was it like performing a film score for an audience? Was there anything that you modified based on the reaction from that performance?

Vin Calianno: It's kind of fascinating the first time you play a work in public. All of this time and effort goes into conceiving the work and figuring it all out and then nuancing it down to the final product — it's really a labor of love. You're never really sure how the audience is really going to react. So you might think you have a hit on your hands and you don't or vice versa. Not to mention, each crowd is really different — different demographics, backgrounds, etc. This is the sixth time I'll be doing this score, so I guess we'll see!

Smile Politely:  Did you participate in last year's IMC Film Fest? What other film festivals have you been a part of?

Vin Calianno: Nah — havent done the IMC festival before. Ive done a few in Buffalo and Rochester, NY a few years back, but that's about it. I have some friends who are producing films out in LA, theyre sending my stuff around the festival circuit, but I havent heard anything from that yet.