This month, the Silent Film Society of Chicago (SFSC) is collaborating with three Chicago-area venues to screen the silent films The Kid (1921), The Artist (2011), and 7th Heaven (1927) with live musical accompaniment.
Since its inception in 1998, SFSC has been preserving and presenting silent films across the Chicago area. “Our mission was to bring silent films to the forefront, because they’d gotten a bit musty,” Wolkowicz notes. “But we got started by doing most of our screenings at the old Gateway Theatre on Lawrence Avenue—that’s a 2,000-seat theater—and we would do it with all the bravado of going to a silent film in the 1920s, with the grand pipe organ and opening the curtain. It was a great scene.”
The first film Wolkowicz accompanied on the organ in front of a live audience was The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). “So I went up there in front of the audience, and it’s 110 minutes,” he says. “After about 15 minutes I was totally lost and really out of my element. And I realized ‘Oh, there’s more work to this than just sitting down at a keyboard.’ So it’s been a lifelong learning curve.”
For more information on locations and tickets for the events, please visit http://www.silentfilmchicago.com/events.htm.
