Make-overs’ mixed reactions

The audience was first shown footage from a ’20s German film depicting London’s underground culture, from exotic dancing to bobbed unconventional beauties running around in outrageously tasteful clubs. It was the kind of thing that makes you suspect you may have been born in the wrong era.

Scenes were repeated again and again, shown slowed down, sped up and halted at different points so that each time I saw the same footage of a striking Chinese woman draped in beads seducing the camera, it seemed a different colour almost.

I sensed what was controversial for the audience was the altered time on the film, combined with the electronica score, being dished out live at the front of the stage by a member of the Flat Earth Society. That, together with the stars and abstract spots of colour super imposed over the original sepia caused a lot of interval grumbling from the mixture of trendy oldies and pretentious twenty-somethings in the audience. I think this was due to a mistaken desire for authenticity, which produced a palpable sense of distaste for the mixture of old and new.

However, the fact that the original footage was altered, quite beautifully according to a modern interpretation of the spirit of the film, made it a much more honest venture than the pretence of seeking authenticity. It highlighted in my mind that the footage, and the film we’d come to see, were pieces of found art watched out of context.

The second film, Ernst Lubitsch’s silent 1919 ‘The Oyster Princess’ shown to a live performed soundtrack is interesting for its satire of American bourgeois society, and is supposedly ground-breaking for being a world away from the slapstick that preceded it.

For me, a world away from slapstick in general it was not, and these elements were enhanced by the innovation of the band in experimental sound and impeccable timing. Highlights included a full on boxing match between a society of far from pathetically girly rich girls in which the drunk hero, (who is the prize they’re fighting over) gets battered.

This film was a delightful piece of history, but not massively stimulating in itself. I hope it becomes more of a trend to show more old films, and particularly more avant-garde films in Brighton, or indeed outside of London.