Thanks to the Maryland Film Festival, it ought to get good and loud and even lyrical at Station North this Thursday through Sunday with a vital, eclectic slate of music-oriented movies.
Alice Donut, for a quarter-century a bulwark of Baltimore's underground rock scene, rockets into above-ground view with "Freaks in Love." "Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone" should set audiences bobbing to the punk-pop-rock-funk sounds of Los Angeles' favorite sextet.
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director Marin Alsop will present "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" — with its galvanizing Ennio Morricone score — to dramatize the operatic glory of inspired movie music.
The Alloy Orchestra, the one-of-a-kind three-man ensemble that uses keyboards, found objects and wind instruments to create a unique percussive sound, will offer original accompaniment to three scintillating silent shorts: Buster Keaton's "One Week," Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's "Back Stage," and Charlie Chaplin's "Easy Street."
The beat begins opening night with the short "Pioneer," starring singer-songwriter Will Oldham. The film's director, David Lowery, says, "Even though [Will] isn't singing in his film, there's a musicality to his delivery that is integral to his performance."
It continues with such wildly different documentaries as Pedro Costa's tribute to French singer-actor Jeanne Balibar, "Ne change rien," and "Last Days Here," "a grimy, full-body immersion in the bloody filth of heavy-metal hell as experienced by Northern Virginia's answer to Black Sabbath, Pentagram." There's also "Hilvarenbeek," an experimental short by musician Dan Deacon and video artist Jimmy Joe Roche, co-curators of the popular "Gunky's Basement" film series.
It all should build to an emotional climax with the closing-night presentation, "Sing Your Song," a sweeping documentary about superstar Harry Belafonte. Taylor Branch, author of "America in the King Years," will engage the pioneering singer/actor/activist in a post-screening conversation that could cover everything from his days as America's king of calypso to his civil-rights activism (American and global) and his many humanitarian crusades, including "We Are the World."
Interviewed this week, Branch, Alsop and other presenters (and directors) are already delivering the zing to a festival that could boast the unpretentious exuberance of a platter party.
• Taylor Branch on Harry Belafonte: "I told him that if he'd come down [to the festival], I'd show up however he wanted me — and he said he wanted me to wear a loincloth. He is very serious, yet he is also just delightful. I'm glad that the film, in that respect, is a lot like Harry. In the civil rights movement, the survival instinct gave rise to some incredible humor and teasing — a lot of it was gallows humor, but a lot of it was whimsical, too. He has all that. I hope we can bring some of that out in the Q&A so it's not all earnest celebrity biography. It'll be fun.
"When he sang the [calypso hit] 'The Banana Boat Song,' to Harry, even that was political, because in a general sort of way he was trying to say that through song we can join the world together. He was introducing music of different cultures to the United States. It was not the hard-nosed politics that he's doing now with his work on juvenile-prison reform or that he did before with Dr. King and SNCC, but it is of a piece with a lot of other things he's done, like [helping organize] 'We Are the World.' Take the title of the film: If you can get somebody to sing a song and sing a song with you, you've gone a long way to crossing cultural boundaries. It's not a sharp-edged sword, but an instrument to create a common family."
•Marin Alsop on Ennio Morricone: "I chose to show 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' because Morricone wrote a phenomenal score for it. I also hoped it would be an unexpected choice for some people — I think some might have expected me to pick [Leonard Bernstein's] 'On the Waterfront,' which is also phenomenal. Morricone's music is so effective and really supports the drama and the action of the movie. When I was a violinist in New York, I used to play for film scores and commercials; I was at the top of that world for 10 years. I always enjoyed working with Morricone. I thought he was one of those John Williams types: These people are really skilled and really understand what music can do to support a film without overwhelming it. I can't stand it when a score is too much.
"I just conducted the score to 'The Gold Rush,' and Charlie Chaplin is one of my all-time heroes: He understood the power of music and a composed score. He composed his scores himself, and they're like opera — his themes establish the characters and tie the drama together and give it subtlety and nuance. A Morricone score like 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' is steeped in this tradition that came out of the late 1920s and 1930s and early 1940s. Morricone conducted his own scores — I remember playing for him for 'The Untouchables.' It was fantastic. He was lovely, delightful, fun to work with. Some of that was his Italian accent!"
•Skizz Cyzik on co-directing "Freaks in Love": "The first Alice Donut album came out when I was the music director at [radio station] WCVT. I loved it. At the time, it was a new direction for punk rock, with more melody, riffs, weirdness and artiness than other punk rock at the time. They may have been ahead of their time, because these days, what I just described doesn't seem so uncommon. …
"My co-director, David Koslowski, and I both played in bands that shared bills with Alice Donut back in the '90s, so we knew they were an interesting bunch. That certainly helps when you're making a documentary. It turns out we got luckier than expected, because what makes Alice Donut special [as] subject matter is they are the one band that has lasted 25 years without the usual in-band turmoil, drug abuse and general setbacks that plague every other band's stories. Here is a band made up of people who genuinely love each other."
•"Last Days Here" co-director Demian Fenton on Pentagram's demon-driven lead singer: "When we met Bobby [Liebling], he was residing in his parent's basement — literally at death's door. Throughout the four-year process of putting this film together, Bobby made tremendous strides in both his musical career and personal life. This struggle to reclaim his life is really what the film is about. Sometimes in the edit room we would shuttle from the first time you see Bobby in the film, to the last ... it looks like two different people. The transformation we documented is truly unbelievable."
•Matt Porterfield ("Putty Hill") on guest-hosting "Ne change rien": "As an actor, Jeanne Balibar has worked with many of my favorite French directors … and she often plays a specific type, displaying immense sensitivity, humor and a kind of tightly wound fragility. She displays these characteristics as a singer, too. But it was my love of this [film's] particular director, Pedro Costa, that brought me to the project. I might not have fallen for her music otherwise. Here, Costa is super-ascetic, stripping everything down, and in this way creating for the audience a heightened awareness of the elements at play. I think 'Ne change rien' contains some of the best footage of musicians working in the studio since 'Symphony for the Devil.' "
•Alloy Orchestra's Ken Winokur on "Masters of Slapstick": "We automatically seem to head off in the direction of Buster Keaton. His genius for comedic invention is so perfectly carried by his precise, yet restrained acting. They seem to work unusually well with modern audiences. Obviously, Chaplin is also amazing. His rich sentiment combines with his masterful physical comedy to make films for the ages.
"The real surprise is Fatty Arbuckle. He really is where all this started. Not only did Arbuckle discover both Chaplin and Keaton, but he directed and acted in so many fantastic films. It's almost unimaginable how this large man can dance and move so gracefully. It's a tragedy that he isn't better known and more respected."
•"Everyday Sunshine" director Lev Anderson on Fishbone: "A generation grew up with Fishbone, and a lot of those people are now professionals working in the media. They may be curious about the movie even if they don't know the music, because they know that Fishbone is made up of these crazy guys who play [among other things] punk rock and metal even though they're black, and that's not something you usually see. … Their identity as black rock-and-rollers adds to their uniqueness. People who have seen their live shows associate them with good positive energy and hope that it will spill over into the film.
"The lives of the band members let us tell the story of the black community in Los Angeles. The characters have a good sense of humor and try to deal with issues everyone can identify with. These are the kind of guys who are totally committed to their craft even when they might be in financial ruin. No matter what the circumstances, they're out there performing."
•Video artist Jimmy Joe Roche on co-directing the short "Hilvarenbeek" with musician Dan Deacon: "When [Dan and I] shot our film [in Hilvarenbeek, the Netherlands] we improv'd most of the music on site and all of the dialogue. … I think we're both pretty good at thinking on our feet and evolving and creating artistic ideas on the fly — which we certainly had to do a lot of when shooting our film in the Netherlands.
"Sound and music can serve to 'flux' time — make it crawl and quicken depending on its quality and relationship to the image. I find the way that sound can bounce between a logical/concrete and illogical/abstract relationship to the image fascinating. I also think that music and audio is a place where indie filmmakers and video artists have equal footing with 'the big dogs' and sometimes even have an edge. Good sound design and music can be just as effective as dialogue or subtitles for giving information."
If you go
For a full schedule and advance tickets for the Maryland Film Festival, this Thursday through Sunday, go to http://www.md-filmfest.com. The festival box office opens Friday, May 6 at 10 a.m. at the Tent Village across the street from the Charles Theatre. Any seats not sold for opening night at MICA's Brown Center (a shorts program starts at 8 p.m., with a reception to follow) will be available when the doors open at 7 p.m.