Something to watch tonight: Monday 21 August

Waxworks (Leni, 1924), Live Cinema at the Wellington Film Society

Wellington audi­ences have been starved of ‘live cinema’ exper­i­ences in recent times. 

Even dur­ing Bill Gosden’s final years, the New Zealand International Film Festival chose to pri­or­it­ise Auckland for those screen­ings but tonight, fol­low­ing the suc­cess of their screen­ing of Faust last year, the Wellington Film Society (with the sup­port of the Goethe Institute) are doing what film soci­et­ies do best by offer­ing the pub­lic at large a rare chance to see a clas­sic silent film with live music­al accompaniment:

Waxworks (dir­ec­ted by Paul Leni) is a clas­sic German silent film from 1924. Made dur­ing a peri­od of huge innov­a­tion in cinema, the film is an antho­logy, with each of its three parts tak­ing on a dif­fer­ent tone and cent­ral char­ac­ter: The Caliph of Baghdad, Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper respect­ively. These stor­ies are linked by a fram­ing device in which a young poet vis­its a wax museum to write back­stor­ies about the his­tor­ic­al figures.

Waxworks was enough of a hit that Paul Leni was able to move from Weimar Germany to the States where he made a num­ber of Hollywood films, includ­ing The Man Who Laughs (1928).

Erika Grant, Rosie Langabeer, Isaac Smith and Neil Feather have cre­ated an ori­gin­al score for the film and will be per­form­ing it at the screen­ing which starts at 6.15 at the Embassy.

Entry is free for film soci­ety mem­bers and by koha for the gen­er­al pub­lic. This is going to be some­thing special.

My pre­view of the Wellington Film Society’s 2023 sea­son is up at RNZ Widescreen. Some of those high­lighted screen­ings are still to come and WFS offers a three-film sampler tick­et if you just want to try them out.