Visualizing Music in the Silent Era: The Collaborative Experiments of Visual Symphony Productions

Abstract

AbstractIn July 1922, the New York Times reported that the “encouraging little film” Danse Macabre was screening at the Rialto Theater in New York City. Directed by filmmaker Dudley Murphy, it starred dancers Adolph Bolm and Ruth Page in a visual interpretation of Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre that synchronized perfectly with live performances of the composition. While film scholars have occasionally cited Danse Macabre and Murphy's other shorts from this period as examples of early avant-garde filmmaking in the United States, discussions of the films are mired in misunderstanding. In this article, I use advertisements, reviews, and other archival materials to trace the production, exhibition, and reception of Murphy's Visual Symphony project. These films, I argue, were not Murphy's alone: rather, they were a collaborative endeavor guided as heavily by musician and film exhibitor Hugo Riesenfeld as by Murphy himself. Recast in this way, the Visual Symphony project highlights evolving approaches to sound–image synchronization in the 1920s, the centrality of theater conductors and musicians to filmmaking in this period, and the various ways in which filmmakers, performers, and exhibitors conceptualized the relationship between music and film, and the live and the mediated, in the final decade of the silent era.