Theatre Gigante - The Wind
The gale seldom stops blowing in Victor Sjöström’s film The Wind. You can’t hear it howling—it’s a silent film, but you can see the buffeted buildings and battered people, the dark layers of windblown dust overspreading everything.
Maybe the sound of that rattling wind will be echoed by Little Bang Theory as the trio of musicians accompanies the Milwaukee screening of this 1928 film, regarded by movie historians as a cinematic masterpiece, a coda to the era of silent pictures.
The Wind and Little Bang Theory are presented by Theatre Gigante. In previous seasons, the Milwaukee performing arts group has paired the Michigan trio with silent films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. Little Bang Theory “adds to rather than underscores the film,” says Gigante’s co-artistic director, Mark Anderson. The trio’s Frank Pahl is one of several contemporary composers writing new, original music for silent movies. He performs it—alongside Terri Sarris and Doug Shimmin—on toy instruments.
“It doesn’t sound like tiny tinker toys—they produce a powerful sound,” Anderson continues. “And it’s not the rinky-dink piano or swelling Wurlitzer organ that people associate with silent movies. Little Bang Theory are contemporary artists adding a new quality to the experience of viewing this film.”
The Wind was filmed on location (a rarity in the 1920s) in the Mojave Desert; the unrelenting gale was produced by airplane engines whirring the sand. It was by some accounts a passion project for its star, one of Hollywood’s top actresses in the ‘20s, Lillian Gish. She loved the Dorothy Scarborough novel it was based on, wrote the initial treatment and convinced producer Irving Thalberg to hire the Swedish director (he went as Victor Seastrom in Hollywood) known for endowing nature with radiant grace as well as themes of destiny and mortality.
The story’s protagonist, Letty (Gish), is a Virginian who arrives by train in the bleak desert landscape. No explanation is offered for her journey or for some of the existential dilemmas, she encounters.
“From a modern perspective, you feel that Letty and other women have to change their lives to be ‘taken care of’ or to simply make it through impossible situations,” says Anderson’s co-artistic partner at Gigante, Isabelle Kralj. “We can understand that The Wind is about climate, about poverty, about the poor state of people struggling against nature.” The film doesn’t explain itself in big block letters, leaving the interpretation to the imagination of each viewer.
The Wind has many moments of comic relief, but the overall mood is dramatic, expressed visually through close-ups and motion. “Most of today’s movies are naturalistic—they try to mimic the natural world as if putting us in the screen,” Kralj says. “A silent film like The Wind has a more conceptual artistic quality through chiaroscuro and the physicality of acting without words. It has a camaraderie with the hybrid work we do.”
“If you think about what we do on stage,” Anderson adds, speaking of Gigante’s brand of theater, “we often use movement and music that can leave dialogue and text behind in almost the same realm as silent film.”
Theatre Gigante present The Wind and Little Bang Theory 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 24 at Jan Serr Studio, 1925 E. Kenilworth Place, 6th Floor. For tickets visit gigantewind.eventbrite.com.
