Pittsburgh Silent Film Festival: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with Live Accompaniment by Pittsburgh Composers Quartet

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) + the luminous short film Symphonie diagonale (Viking Eggeling, 1923) with live accompaniment by Pittsburgh Composers Quartet.

In 1920, one brilliant movie jolted the postwar masses and catapulted the movement known as German Expressionism into film history. That movie was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a plunge into the mind of insanity that severs all ties with the rational world. Director Robert Wiene and a visionary team of designers crafted a nightmare realm in which light, shadow and substance are abstracted, a world in which a demented doctor and a carnival sleepwalker perpetrate a series of ghastly murders in a small community.

The Pittsburgh Composers Quartet (Patrick Breiner: tenor saxophone, clarinets; Adam Kantz: drums, electronics; Mark Micchelli: piano, keyboards; Ben Opie: saxophones, clarinets, electronics) draws on a variety of sources and techniques, ranging from traditional and free jazz to modern classical techniques. Performances are lively, unpredictable and fun!

The culmination of over a decade of silent film exhibition in the area, the Pittsburgh Silent Film Society’s 1st Pittsburgh Silent Film Festival will take place September 24 to October 1, 2023. Nine films will screen at eight venues around the Pittsburgh area, with half a dozen musicians providing live accompaniment. The festival will coincide with the 3rd annual Silent Movie Day, a world-wide celebration of silent film occurring each year on September 29 – a project which was co-founded in 2021 by Pittsburgh Silent Film Festival director Chad Hunter. Film director Martin Scorsese remarked on the effort: “This is exactly the kind of activist spirit we need right now in the world of cinema.”