The historical field trials continue at our silent film matinée! Last year, we let Küspert & colleagues improvise on films they had never seen before – which was quite common practice for cinema musicians 100 years ago. At the 51st Film Festival, we venture another excursion into the cinematographic sound concepts of that era: in addition to cinema musicians, there were also cinema narrators who brought the silent events on the screen artistically and emotionally closer to the audience. Ralph Turnheim, a professional silent film narrator who is unique in the German-speaking world, shows us what this could sound like, accompanied by the exceptional Austrian pianist Gerhard Gruber.
Ralph Turnheim
The fact that he was awarded the German Silent Film Prize in 2023 shows that the Austrian-born filmmaker’s art offers more than “just retelling films”. The laudatory speech in the silent film magazine reads as follows: With Viennese charm, the trained actor and Wiesbaden resident by choice rhymes his witty, sometimes black-humored texts to the images on the screen. His skillful wordplay picks up on the action and repeatedly exposes plot clichés. Ralph Turnheim plays all the roles, whether it’s the liana-wielding jungle hero Tarzan, the creepy Frankenstein’s monster or the heroic Black Pirate. [Turnheim’s] screen lyricism is an extraordinary crossover of cabaret and silent film.”
Gerhard Gruber
Pianist Gerhard Gruber, born in 1951, studied jazz at the Graz University of Music and has been an active accompanist for silent films on the piano since 1988. In the meantime, Gruber has accompanied more than 650 different silent films in countless international performances – from Los Angeles, Washington, Delhi and Mumbai to Padua, Bordeaux and Madrid. His enthusiasm for this activity has always been unbroken, as he himself explains: “The feeling of being in the middle of the action was indescribable from the very beginning and has remained unchanged to this day. In 2008, he was awarded the Stage Art Prize of the Province of Upper Austria.
More information about this year’s silent film can be found here: The Black Pirate