Spring Break
St. Mark's screens powerfully eerie live-music Hunchback
Issue date: 2/21/08
Criterion has just released Carnival of Souls, famed for its eerie church-organ-centric plot (if not as a notorious rip-off of the classic "Hitch-Hiker" Twilight Zone episode) as part of its distinguished collection. The film is likely to induce near-hypnosis in the open-minded - remarkable considering its $17,000 budget - and what was once limited to a slapdash four-for-one-dollar bin release can now be yours for $35.99. It's not the first time I've been startled by a Criterion pick (see the curious release of Robinson Crusoe on Mars), but it's got me thinking: Are the powers that be starting to give organ-heavy scores credit where credit's long overdue?
This past Sunday, St. Mark's Lutheran Church on St. Paul and 20th Streets hosted a free screening of Wallace Worsley's 1923 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, accompanied by a live organ score performed by James Harp, the church's own cantor. Far from a work of religious triumph, Victor Hugo's gruesome Romantic tale sets crimes of passion and their tragic ends in the setting of Paris's famed Gothic cathedral during its medieval heyday.
Worsley had the unforeseen fortune of directing the picture a decade before the Hays Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 set a polished pall over L.A., so a tasteful amount of violence was kept intact with respect to Hugo's novel. Public torture. Adultery. Fending off riotous masses of thieves with molten lead. The interior sets, evoking a stylized Gothic architecture perhaps owing more to the sumptuous Hollywood Babylon era than to 15th century France, seemed an odd juxtaposition to the colorful mosaics of St. Mark's Byzantine interior.
Any surviving prints of the film are in poor shape, missing about 15 minutes of footage, and DVD transfers can't do much to fix that. To compound this, the viewing screen was a bit small and full rather than wide. Aside from these inescapable circumstances, watching Lon Chaney's Quasimodo scale down the Notre Dame facade to cascading organ arpeggios was positively breathtaking.
This past Sunday, St. Mark's Lutheran Church on St. Paul and 20th Streets hosted a free screening of Wallace Worsley's 1923 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, accompanied by a live organ score performed by James Harp, the church's own cantor. Far from a work of religious triumph, Victor Hugo's gruesome Romantic tale sets crimes of passion and their tragic ends in the setting of Paris's famed Gothic cathedral during its medieval heyday.
Worsley had the unforeseen fortune of directing the picture a decade before the Hays Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 set a polished pall over L.A., so a tasteful amount of violence was kept intact with respect to Hugo's novel. Public torture. Adultery. Fending off riotous masses of thieves with molten lead. The interior sets, evoking a stylized Gothic architecture perhaps owing more to the sumptuous Hollywood Babylon era than to 15th century France, seemed an odd juxtaposition to the colorful mosaics of St. Mark's Byzantine interior.
Any surviving prints of the film are in poor shape, missing about 15 minutes of footage, and DVD transfers can't do much to fix that. To compound this, the viewing screen was a bit small and full rather than wide. Aside from these inescapable circumstances, watching Lon Chaney's Quasimodo scale down the Notre Dame facade to cascading organ arpeggios was positively breathtaking.
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