I live in Indiana. The chances of me getting to see a World Premiere for any movie are slim to none.
But IU Cinema Director Jon Vickers has granted me that opportunity with a strange, but certainly not unwelcome selection.
The 1922 Nordisk Film adaptation of “David Copperfield” had its World Premiere Saturday with the performance of a student performed, conducted and composed score by IU Jacobs School of Music sophomore Ari Barack Fisher.
The film had never existed in any digital form, had no existing score and may have never screened in America, but the Library of Congress and the British Film Archives provided a surprisingly pristine film print to the world-class cinema Saturday night for the special occasion.
Having reported on the film for the Indiana Daily Student (which you can read here), I knew to expect good things, but I’m now proud to report that “David Copperfield” is a quaint, lush and lovely silent film that now has an equally moving, touching and complex score to accompany it.
Here is a film made in Denmark that has the stunning production values of a Hollywood film, and in that way it is a dense movie full of changing tones and moods. Fisher’s score adheres to that wonderfully.
The score is expressive and attentive to detail at each moment. Fisher had never composed a score for a feature film before, let alone a silent, so the score carries itself differently than a solo piano accompanist might. Fisher’s compositions turn some of the motions on screen into a deliberate and delicate ballet, building new tropes scene by scene into miniature movements rather than one overarching piece functioning as background.
Swimming violins, stand out oboes, triangles and no brass at all develop distinguished and vibrant themes for each of the characters. Fisher’s score is minimal in the way it can generate sorrow with little more than a pair of resonating strings, and it rightfully has an Old Hollywood composure.
With the score, “David Copperfield” is a stunning package. And what becomes quickly clear is that despite a fairly flimsy adaptation of the Charles Dickens story, Director A.W. Sandberg arranges a lush cinematic spectacle.
“David Copperfield” is a long book originally published episodically, and this, at 75 minutes, is hardly a long film. The story, which follows David Copperfield from birth to boyhood to manhood is fairly condensed. And in the end it treats what is considered Dickens’ most autobiographical story as quite literally his life story. Yet Sandberg’s vivid set dressing, costumes and casting envision just the right Dickensian atmosphere in a way that the screenplay adaptation cannot.
The screenplay by Laurdis Skands does try however. Many of the intertitles borrow Dickens’s prose to make for a slightly more literary silent film than you may expect. It boils down the story to the nuts and bolts of the characters, with young David fearing his stepfather, soon losing his mother and then walking miles to find his aunt. The depth exists in the visuals, but the lack of verbal details makes for more than a few amusing non-sequiturs.
“I hate boys AND donkeys,” David’s aunt says rather abruptly before another title card reading nothing but “DICK!” Or what of the two women who should’ve been birds? Follow that with the ungainly image of a man violently rocking a baby cradle and you have yourself a movie.
But the film is lovely. “David Copperfield” has the sort of tender close-ups and unnatural settings that would’ve made Old Hollywood proud. There’s one gorgeous moment in a flower patch that speaks to all the film’s beauty. It even is fairly quick in it’s editing for a silent film. The film is so quick in its storytelling that the orchestra kept on its toes to keep pace.
For the obvious reason that it had not and could not have been seen, “David Copperfield” sat on IMDB with a 5.7 user score and a measly 11 user votes (it now has 12 because of MY vote).
Suffice it to say, you won’t find this film on Netflix. But the IU Cinema is hosting a tour with the film and the score so that others can see this wonderful movie. If you are a programmer looking for a unique silent film experience, please reach out to the IU Cinema and consider “David Copperfield.”
For a sampling of the film and its score, here is a video package I created for the Indiana Daily Student profiling the composer and the film prior to its premiere.
All images courtesy of The Library of Congress