Live Music by American Music Club w/ the film Street Angel
9:00 pm, Saturday, April 23
American Music Club is notorious for their adventurousness, naked emotionalism and unpredictable, volcanic performances. They are one of the most significant cult bands since the Velvet Underground (such bands as Radiohead, Coldplay and Pearl Jam cite their influence). After eight albums, the band split up in 1995, then reassembled in 2003 to produce Love Songs for Patriots: a passion play of politics and everyday melodrama, filled with lush and tantalizing soundscapes. The world premiere of AMC’s score for Street Angel reels from operatic tradition to glam rock, circus music to musique concrete and features the heartrending voice and lyrics of Mark Eitzel.
Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon Street
Street Angel
Directed by Frank Borzage
We are proud to present the work of underappreciated master director Frank Borzage with this restored print of Street Angel. Like Borzage’s Seventh Heaven (1927), Street Angel pairs silent film superstars Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell as star-crossed lovers and bears Borzage’s twin directorial trademarks of romanticism and expressionistic menace. Gaynor plays Angela, a young woman battered by circumstance, pushed into the hard choice of selling her virtue or letting her ill mother go without care. On the lam from her prostitution charge, Angela is nabbed by the police on the eve of her wedding, producing an aching sequence of melodramatic heartbreak. Gaynor won an Academy Award for her performance (she won the very first best actress Oscar, given for all her work that year, which included Seventh Heaven and Murnau’s masterpiece, Sunrise) and Farrell gives an equally gut-wrenching turn as Gino, a young artist scraping by and hoping for a break. Set mainly in a shadowy rendition of Naples (the opening title card reads: “Naples… under the smoking menace of Vesuvius… laughter-loving, careless, sordid Naples”) the film is realized through expressionistic sets depicting seedy streets, traveling circuses and gulag-like prisons. As Judy Bloch from the Pacific Film Archive has noted about Street Angel, “realism was never a priority for Borzage, who dealt in the visual transference of emotion, and this film is a triumph of Borzagian style and themes.” Street Angel rarely delves into day-to-day realities, instead concerning itself with more pressing issues like human frailty, kismet and true love.
—Sean Uyehara
Additional Notes
Total running time 102 min. at 24 frames per second. Silent with live musical accompaniment by American Music Club. Presented in association with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.
Cost: $20, $25