Friday, November 20, 2009 East Central Illinois

11th Annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival 2009

Alloy Orchestra helps audience probe depths of 'The Last Command'

By: Amy F. Reiter
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Story Photo

Photo by: John Dixon

The Alloy Orchestra plays a live score to accompany the silent film, 'The Last Command,' on Friday at Roger Ebert's Film Festival at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign.

CHAMPAIGN – A watery-eyed old man, head nodding uncontrollably, grabs at a medal, snatched from him by another extra on the movie they are about to film about the Russian revolution.

The medal was given to him by the tzar of Russia, the man says, and as the lights fade, the black and white film flashes back to 1917, to the Russian revolution, back when the man commanded thousands as a Russian general and cousin to the tzar.

The story within a story got another chapter when the Alloy Orchestra took hold of it, layering their score onto the silent 1928 film, as both played on Friday afternoon in the Virginia Theatre on the third day of Roger Ebert's Film Festival.

"Our job is to bring these into the present," said Alloy musician Roger Miller.

"Our secret weapon is we practice like devils," said fellow musician Terry Donahue.

Called "The Last Command," the film earned notoriously difficult star Emil Jannings the first-ever Oscar for Best Actor for his characterization of the General, a man brought from greatness to defeat as revolutionaries take over Russia and a beautiful revolutionary helps him escape the country with his life.

Janning's general ends up working as an extra in Hollywood, where a sadistic former revolutionary spots his headshot and casts him as – what else? – a Russian general.

Jannings "was sort of the go-to guy for masochism in the silent era," said Michael Phillips, film critic for the Chicago Tribune and a panelist for the post-movie discussion, along with "My Winnipeg" director Guy Maddin, Alloy musicians Miller, Donahue and Ken Winokur, and film scholar Kristin Thompson.

Maddin praised the movie's willingness to go over the top with Hollywood archetypes.

"How do we get this to 11?" he imagined the director, Josef von Sternberg, saying. "The wind machine!"

But within that, there's humanity, Donahue said.

"The characters, at first glance, you think they're going to be two-dimensional," he said. "They're really so much deeper than you expect them to be."

The music helped convey that depth, Maddin said. "It almost needed the Alloy Orchestra to bang chamber pots for the true transcendence."

Chaz Ebert credited Alloy for bringing a genre back to the public eye. "They have actually helped revive some of the great masterpieces of the silent era."

Other festival stories