Paris L'Étranger Fest: Day 13

Sunday, September 15

This is the final day of the 30th Paris L'Étranger Film Festival. I've attended five screenings, and overall it's been a pretty good experience. I haven't had a lot of options, because of the language barrier, but what i've seen has been worth it.

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Nosferatu, A Symphony of Terror

I've made a bit of a logistical error here.
    I mentioned before, but it was like 100 pages ago so i'll bring it up again, the Berlin Fantasy Filmfest was nice, because all the English films were subtitled in German, and films in any other language were subtitled in English, so i could see whatever i wanted. Paris, on the other hand, all the films in French had no subtitles, and any other languages were subtitled in French. So i was pretty much limited to only films that were already in English.
    Or silent. Today i was seeing the 1922 silent film Nosferatu, with live musical accompaniment. It seemed to me that there should be no reason i'd have trouble with a silent film.
    I forgot about title cards. I forgot, entirely, wholesale, full on oublié, that most films from the silent era include title cards between shots to give exposition or add dialog.
    All of these title cards were in French.
    You might think, wait, shouldn't they have just used the original presentation? Wouldn't those title cards have originally been in English?
    No. Nosferatu is a German film. I'd have been completely screwed with the original version.
    I think the last time i watched Nosferatu all the way through, start to finish, was 2009 or 10. I was at MMI, and i had pulled down a copy off of Archive Dot Org for free, to use clips of in a video project i was working on. I might also have seen it once in high school, i don't remember for sure. So it's not like i was going to vividly remember what these cards are supposed to say.
    This did kind of present a fun challenge for me, though. The first few title cards stayed up long enough that i was able to read through them two and a half times, even counting the time my brain spent churning out a translation. There were, of course, a lot of words that i don't know, but i was able to figure out enough to get the gist of it most of the time.
    As the movie went on, though, those title cards started getting less and less screen time, and there were several that i couldn't even read through once before they were gone.
    Still, i think i understood the movie well enough. Like i said, i have seen it before, and i have read Dracula, although that was probably even longer ago. So if i hadn't nodded off several times during the presentation, i probably still would have been able to figure out the whole story. As it is, there are a few fuzzy spots in the middle.
    The live music was wonderful. One pianist and one drummer, who also controlled some electronic elements through a laptop and a set of drum triggers. He also had a microphone, which he would occasionally use to add in some heavily reverbed mouth sounds. He might have been whispering in French, i'm not sure, or he might have just been making creepy noises. Either way, it totally worked.
    I had taken the lens off my R6m2 and hidden the pieces in the inside pockets of my vest. I've done this a few times at the festivals now, and never been questioned about the bulkiness of my clothes. I've had no intention of trying to bootleg the movies, i don't find those kind of screen recordings useful or watchable. But for this, i suddenly thought, while i was standing in line waiting for admission, why the hell did it not occur to me to bring the Zoom H2 audio recording device i have in my backpack, and record the live music, to sync up to my own copy of Nosferatu later? I have the Zoom H2 because i used to be a prolific bootlegger of concerts, and it's a perfect device for that. I really wish i'd done that today.
    I did see a couple of people with large, professional video cameras, so i think they hired videographers for the event. I wonder when or if that recording will be publicly available, because i certainly would not mind experiencing this combination again. Although preferably with English title cards this time.