Live music has helped keep the silent cinema alive, and Chicago is such a rich music town that revivals of silent features often rank among the more promising events on the fall arts calendar. On October 2 the University of Chicago Film Studies Center will welcome the inventive Alloy Orchestra to Logan Center for the Arts to premiere its score for Varieté (1925), a German melodrama starring Emil Jannings as a middle-aged carnival barker who falls for a beautiful young trapeze artist. The ever-reliable Silent Film Society of Chicago will present a series of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton classics at city and suburban venues, accompanied by organist Jay Warren. And Renée Baker will conduct her adventurous Chicago Modern Orchestra Project ensemble as it performs two of her scores for “race films” of the silent era: the Oscar Micheaux classic Body and Soul (1925) at Music Box on September 18, and the aviation adventure The Flying Ace (1926) at Logan Center on October 22.
The Flying Ace, whose score is still a work in progress, presents a different kind of challenge. Produced by the Norman Studios in Jacksonville, Florida, it’s a lightweight entertainment in which a decorated flying ace returns to his hometown and investigates the mysterious disappearance of a railroad paymaster. Despite the title, it contains no aerial footage, though director Richard E. Norman does stage an absurd barnstorming stunt for the climax: when a rival pilot kidnaps the heroine in his prop plane, the hero flies over them and drops a rope ladder so that she can climb to safety. “It will have to be very different than Body and Soul,” Baker says of her score, “because it’s not pulling the same emotional content out of me. It may be a little more on the contemporary-classical side, with a nod to some jazz.” The movie’s shortcomings aren’t something she wants to exploit, though. “One thing I don’t ever like to do is to use music to cheapen something,” she says. “That’s just not my way.”
Directed by Oscar Micheaux Sun 9/18, noon Music Box Theatre 773-871-6604 musicboxtheatre.com $12
