The Department of French and Italian is pleased to present a special event featuring internationally renowned musicians Donald Sosin (piano), Joanna Seaton (voice), and Alicia Svigals (violin), who specialize in live accompaniment for silent cinema.
Join us in the Dixon Annex Recital Hall on Saturday, October 25, for two unique programs:
- 1:00 p.m. – Workshop on Silent Film Music and Improvisation. Open to all students and faculty, especially in Music, Digital Media Practices, and Cinema Studies.
- 5:30 p.m. – Silent Film Screening with Live Musical Accompaniment, featuring short films and excerpts from French, Italian, and German-Jewish silent traditions. Open to everyone.
Don’t miss this rare opportunity to experience the magic of silent film with live, original music performed by world-class artists.
More info: http://oldmoviemusic.com | http://aliciasvigals.com
More About the Artists
Donald Sosin has built an extensive career in music and performance spanning more than fifty years. He has served as Music Director on Broadway and Off-Broadway and has performed as a keyboardist in numerous major productions, including Evita and Annie. His work as a composer encompasses television, theater, dance, choral and orchestral music, chamber works, songs, and silent film scores. With his piano, he has accompanied silent films at some of the world’s most prestigious festivals, including Italy’s Le Giornate del Cinema Muto and Il Cinema Ritrovato, the Thailand Silent Film Festival, the Shanghai Silent Film Festival, the Odessa InternatIonal Film Festival, as well as leading U.S. festivals such as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and the Washington, D.C. Jewish Film Festival.
Joanna Seaton, who is a professional singer and children’s music therapist, often performs with Sosin. Together, they lead workshops in songwriting, musical theater, and silent film music, engaging participants ranging from K–12 students to college students and educators. Their workshops introduce learners to song structure, lyric writing, and melody composition. The participants gain insight into how music deeply affects viewers’ perceptions of film, both emotionally and narratively.
Alicia Svigals, violinist and composer, is widely recognized as the world’s leading klezmer fiddler. Credited with almost singlehandedly reviving klezmer fiddling—once on the brink of extinction—she brought it renewed visibility with her landmark 1996 solo album Fidl. Svigals has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Allen Ginsberg and members of Led Zeppelin, and her writings on Jewish music appear in anthologies such as American Klezmer: Its Roots and Offshoots. Since 2018, she and Donald Sosin have collaborated on performances of remarkable Jewish-themed silent films from the 1920s, combining piano and violin to bring these works vividly back to life.
More About the Events
The Workshop
For more than 30 years, Joanna Seaton and Donald Sosin have been creating music for silent films. In this 90-minute workshop, they will explore the art of scoring silent films, both for live performance and for recordings, illustrating their talk with numerous examples from classic films. Participants will gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between film and music—a connection that applies not only to historic works but also to contemporary cinema. If there are student musicians in the audience, they will be invited to improvise for selected clips. The workshop offers a lively, hands-on introduction for anyone interested in film and in how music shapes our experience of it.
The Performance
The 90-minute performance program will be divided into three 30-minute segments.
French Silent Films
Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton will present a selection of short films and excerpts from feature-length works in their French silent film repertoire, accompanied by live piano, voice, and percussion. Possible selections include works by the Lumière Brothers, Alice Guy Blaché, Louis Feuillade, Abel Gance, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Max Linder, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Fescourt, and others. Over the past three decades, the duo has performed these works at archives, festivals, museums, and universities across the United States and abroad. The program will highlight a wide variety of styles—newsreels, dramas, comedies, and avant-garde films—that demonstrate the richness and influence of French cinema from its earliest days.
Italian Silent Films
The second segment will feature selections from Italian silent films, drawn from Sosin and Seaton’s extensive repertoire. Donald has performed regularly at Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato, one of Europe’s most important silent film festivals, every year since 1999, often in collaboration with Joanna. For many years, he also worked closely with curator Mariann Lewinsky on her Cento Anni Fa series, presenting century-old films from European archives. Possible selections include excerpts from Nino Oxilia’s Rapsodia Satanica, Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria, Mario Roncoroni’s Filibus, Antonio Vidali’s Spartacus, Eugenio Giusti’s Signore Giurati, as well as newsreels and travelogues. Notable stars such as Lydia Borelli, Francesca Bertini, Pina Menichelli, and Bartolomeo Pagano (famed for the Maciste series) will be featured for their expressive performances.
Jewish Silent Films
The final segment will showcase excerpts from four Jewish silent films that Donald Sosin and Alicia Svigals have scored together, accompanied by live piano and violin. They will also discuss their collaborative composing process. Highlights include:
- Ewald André Dupont’s The Ancient Law (1923) – A powerful drama contrasting life in an Eastern European shtetl with the liberal society of 1860s Vienna, featuring historically authentic sets and renowned actors.
- H. K. Breslauer’s The City Without Jews (1924) – A visionary work set in the fictional city of Utopia, exploring the social and political consequences of an anti-Semitic expulsion law.
- Eleanor Antin’s The Man Without a World (1992) – A modern homage to silent film style, depicting Jewish, Cossack, and peasant life in a Polish village; though it appears Soviet-era, it was filmed in San Diego.
- Ivan Abramson and Sidney M. Goldin’s East and West (1923) – A spirited Austrian comedy-drama about a headstrong New Yorker who travels to Galicia for a family wedding and encounters a young Talmudic scholar.
Together, these films reveal the vibrancy and diversity of Jewish filmmaking in the silent era and beyond.
Sponsored by the French and Italian Department, Kathryn B. Gore Chair in French Studies, Tulane University School of Liberal Arts Center for Scholars, Maurice L. Silverstein Cinema Studies Lectureship Fund, Italian Studies Fund, Language Learning Center, Department of Jewish Studies, Department of Comparative Literature, Tulane Global Humanities Center, and Newcomb Department of Music.