American Music Club's Live Score

"We're a little nervous," says composer Marc Capelle on the phone in San Francisco. He along with Mark Eitzel's American Music Club have been making music for years, have built a devoted following that includes fans and fellow musicians, and have played countless live shows around the world.

But they've never played one quite like this. On Saturday, April 23, as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, they'll perform, one time only, their new score for Frank Borzage's 1928 silent classic Street Angel.

In the studio where they've been spending 10-hour days, they screen and re-screen portions of the film on a computer as they work out the rough spots.

"Should we bring the whistlers in here?" asks Capelle?

"Stop composing. You're composing." says Eitzel, seated with his guitar.

"No, I'm arranging."

"It's the never-ending argument," says bassist Dan Pearson.

With 140 minutes of material written in the last 4 months, nearly all of it new, the line between composing and arranging blurs as the pieces fall into place. Resisting the urge to pepper the score with American Music Club songs, they're using only one: "Love Is" from the latest album Love Songs For Patriots.

"It just seemed to fit the scene," says Eitzel. When the festival approached the band with the idea of scoring Street Angel, the whole project seemed like a perfect fit. Prostitution and hangovers which figure prominently in the plot are well-travelled territory for the band's music, while "melodrama" and "naked emotionalism," the terms the band has jokingly but affectionately adopted as their tag lines, apply equally well to Street Angel.

They've embraced the film with a real sense of collaboration, which Eitzel says is really the only way it could work. He's a songwriter but doesn't read music, so he and Capelle rely on each band member to bring something to the table. Some parts were written individually, some written in pairs or together as a band which consists of Eitzel on vocals and guitars, Capelle on organ and piano, Vudi on guitar, Dan Pearson on bass, Jason Borger on keyboards, and Tim Mooney on drums.

The film itself has a recurring theme of whistling--two lovers using a favorite tune as a touchstone--which the band has turned into a leitmotif by bringing in two professional whistlers, Carla Fabrizio and Kurt Stevenson, which was no simple recruiting task since the annual whistling competition in Lewisburg, North Carolina, takes place at the same time as the San Francisco festival, tying up many puccalo artists, as they're known, just when Street Angel was calling. But Fabrizio and Stevenson were game, and they'll mirror the film's two leads, played by Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell.

Also featured in the score is avant-garde percussionist William Winant, known for his collaborations with John Cage and Mr. Bungle. Although Winant already had an engagement for the night, he recorded percussive samples for the band to use at key moments.

The most eccentric portions of the score, however, may be the parts provided by mechanical birds. The band commissioned a toy maker to create caged, feathered robots that sing samples, almost a form of musique contrete. They'll be operated by Erik Shank, but they have a built-in degree of randomness for a truly spontaneous performance.

The notion of mechanical birds might sound like a hoot, but the band is quite serious about their utility as instruments. The whistling between the movie's lovers winds through the story like a thin cord of intimacy, real or lost, and when one character is imprisoned, the appearance of a caged bird dimly lit beyond the edge of the screen seems entirely appropriate.

"What it allows us to do," says Capelle, "is drop the level of a loud performance down to something like you'd hear through an air shaft and force people to listen during this very poignant part of the film where the story really takes a corner, where Borzage totally proves that he's the master of American expressionism with some of the most beautiful shots you'll ever see."

The band jokes that their use of professional whistlers and birds may herald a new movement: "the new literalism".

Although the movie is not as well known as Borzage's previous film, Seventh Heaven, or its contemporary Sunrise, Murnau's masterpiece from 1927--all of which star a very busy Janet Gaynor--Capelle is intrigued by Street Angel's structure. It's long at 140 minutes, and the middle third is essentially a dinner, but like a Godard movie which suddenly slows its pace to match real time spent between lovers, Street Angel challenges the expectations of how and what a movie captures.

An event like this--while no doubt attractive to fans of Mark Eitzel, American Music Club or silent film--is also an opportunity for audiences to reconnect with an older art form. Now in its 48th year, the SFIFF is the oldest film festival in the country, the first film festival established outside of Europe. What was once a novel idea has now spread so wide that the country is covered with film festivals, each of them unique, each of them showing movies you won't have many opportunities to see elsewhere, each of them exposing a surprisingly large, gaping hole in the offerings of the local multiplex. Silent films like Street Angel won't be showing at the mall--with live accompaniment by the American Music Club, no less--any time soon.

Taking a couple of hours away from the studio, the band zips over to the San Francisco Film Centre to give a lecture in the Centre's monthly Sound and Cinema series. In the car on the way over, Eitzel describes how their feelings about the movie changed as they watched it repeatedly. Characters who they initially didn't like now seem essential.

To the lecture's attendees, Capelle explains, "The emotional logic of the film has proven itself to us. Mark had an excellent point that the character we didn't like at first was actually incredibly important because Janet Gaynor's character loves him so much. And once we realized that, we became more and more involved emotionally."

They describe the score--something that's become increasingly difficult to do--as a bit like Velvet Underground at times, a bit like Dusty Springfield, a fair bit like the American Music Club. Professional whistlers. Circus music. (Gaynor's character joins the circus.) Opera samples. Robot birds.

"We're not making fun of this movie," Eitzel clarifies. "You can't. Janet Gaynor is a great actress and you have to respect that level of artistry. Anyone who even tries to make fun of this movie is an asshole.... It's a beautiful film. It's very long, but the payoff is really great. I think some people will be moved to tears."

If the lines between composing and arranging are blurred, so are the lines between viewing and performing, between music and the visuals they accompany. In their score, the band is responding to the film in much the same way an audience would. "I think that everyone alive now experiences movies musically and knows in their atoms that film and music are connected." says Eitzel.

After the lecture the band heads back to the studio to squeeze in a bit more work before midnight. And all this for a single show? They're still undecided about whether they'll even make an archival recording. Capelle says maybe they will. Eitzel says, "Maybe it's better if we don't." So the songs may fade like a whistle on the wind. They're considering taking the film and the score to Europe, so the possibility is open for a repeat performance.

But for now all eyes are on Saturday. And on a bit of rest the day after.