Meet your Makers

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(There is currently nothing to find in this section. Please check back during the Spring, and there will be content. Super serious.)

Jeff Rapsis, Manchester, NH: A Conversation.

(Jeff Rapsis)

     “There is an old saying; ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ Well, how about history? Imagine if we had a record of Shakespeare’s time. As of now, we have a record of what the early 20^th century looked like.”

      Jeff Rapsis said this to me one December weekend at a diner in Manchester, New Hampshire. He had finished playing keyboards for a screening. It was a dull sort of cold outside, and we were in Manchester besides. Jeff Rapsis is likely the most interesting guy you’ll find in the city (even if he lives in the nearby town of Bedford. But anyway.)  This is not simply because he plays keyboards, although he does, with the dedication of a man who realized long ago that his hobby is, in fact, his job, and his job is the joy of spontaneous creation. Jeff is more so interesting because he is a silent film experiential-ist. He is an unusual sort of film fan; one who would rather add to the texture of film than simply watch it. He wants you to see something made eighty-something years ago because, to him, this thing is cinematic and cinema is musical. And vice-versa.

      Jeff followed his historical declaration with an anecdote.

     “’Grandma’s Boy’ starts with a visual gag: Harold (Lloyd) and a car. He’s cranking something. You think he’s cranking a car. But the camera pulls back and it turns out he’s making ice cream! Completely foreign to people today.”

      Realizing that we had been bantering about silent films for the past half hour or so, I decided to change gears and ask Jeff an actual interview question. How did he get started?

      “In Junior High, 7^th Grade, we had a music teacher who happened to be a film collector. He brought in a film called 1 AM, a Chaplin 2-reeler from 1916. I had heard of Chaplin, but had never seen anything he did. I really connected with it. I became something of a film geek. I studied music separately, and thought of becoming a composer. Fast forward to 2000. A friend asked me to do a score for his film. So I wrote a 1-and-a-half hour score.” Shortly after, he saw a Harold Lloyd film at the Brattle Theater in Boston. The score was horrible. “ ‘I can do better than that,’” Jeff recalls thinking.

    Jeff remembers these events happening in 2006 or 2007. He was born and raised in New Hampshire and had gone to college in New York City. Despite his musical and cinematic ambitions, the professional route Jeff ended up taking was somewhat more straightforward: he became a journalist and is now a newspaper publisher. His weekly independent publication, The Hippo, may be found in newsstands on the streets of Manchester.

   But his most serious hobby—his professional hobby, one might say—is, at this point, the one by which cinema knows him. Jeff found a way to return to music, and to silent film by becoming a silent movie accompanist. It is a practice similar to that of Ben Model in New York City, or Paul Merton in London: a presentable mix of film history, musical showmanship, and film watching. Rapsis plays regularly at the public library in Manchester, and in other venues around New Hampshire, along with trips to Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, and occasionally outside of New England.

    I suppose the real reason I sought Jeff out was to find out, or more clearly understand, what silent film was. Or should I say is? Was it ever? No metaphysics crept in to our banter, but Jeff nonetheless laid-out a fairly concise explanation of what silent film was (yes, past tense), and what it still is to him.

   “In silent cinema, the visual image was all you had, but you find directors creating images that showcase key moments in the film, unusual juxtapositions, etcetera. All [of] that essential visual aspect was forgotten for a little while. Mary Pickford said she thought it would be more logical if silent film came after sound, because it was a more demanding form.”

   “The big factor,” Jeff continued, “was radio. In the 30s, many, many films are like radio plays that became films. W.C Fields, a silent film actor, became a major star when you could hear him talk.There is, naturally, an aesthetic joy in hearing people talk, in hearing sounds happen."

   Those words—‘a more demanding form’— made me see the form silent cinema had ended up taking in our minds. Rapsis’ shows are entertaining, funny and his historical knowledge of the form is quirky and intriguing. But the real reason either of us, or most of Jeff’s audience, engages with silent film at all is because of that lofty ideal that some part of us believes. That silent film is more demanding, and therefore better for you. It is therefore better for movies as an entity.

    “I’ve found that it’s not a large audience. It’s a niche,” he said. “But it seems to me that, in smaller communities it’s easier to build an audience. People come, they tell their friends, and it becomes a big thing.”

    But Jeff Rapsis is a showman: for him, the value of silent film is not a moral question, or a good thing we she have in regular helpings, like asparagus. It is about reconstructing age-old experiences. “It depends on the variables of the presentation,” he said. The problem is that eighty years later, recreating that experience becomes very hard. You have the need for a theater. If you can put humpty dumpty back together again, you can do it. These films are more timeless than what people think.”

    It is also, quite simply, about causing fun to happen. “You look at a film like Buster Keaton’s the cameraman and you get the sense that they had so much fun making this movie. It brings out a certain joy. The films in the silent era were more honest. People believed what they saw. Buster Keaton actually did that (his own stunts). So you believe that.”

    Believing what you see. It’s a terribly corny maxim that we only apply to children’s films and Christian music in this day and age. But if we are honest, it does in fact apply to all films. Films are flights of logic and rushes of perception; they are believable escapes from the unbroken visual monotony of our waking lives. As we sat there, in that diner, with the night increasing and the tables around us being wiped, I could not see a single thing near me that resembled cinema.

    So I finished my hash browns and asked Jeff about silent film and the future of cinema.

    He looked down at his plate. He scraped some salad around. “It’s like biology,” he said. “We can’t allow one species to go extinct.”

His memory jogged, Jeff sat up. “Actually, filming reality is almost incidental,” he said. I had the good fortune to live in Tokyo. It was one of the few places where I didn’t know where the ground was. And when a movie denies you that, it’s disorienting. When you watch a great film, you know where the ground is.”

    We left the diner. Jeff had picked up the tab, which left me feeling a little guilty. But it’s hard to feel genuinely awkward in his presence. As I walked with him back to his car, he told me I should come out to more screenings. I told him I would pick up a copy of his newspaper. We exchanged goodbyes and the darkness of the side street where he’d parked his car made him vanish. Before he went out of sight, I realized he was one of the few people I’d met who looked positively average, like anybody’s neighbor, in a suit.

    I made my way back to my car. Manchester at night is a grind; you don’t park your car, you allow it to be hoarded by a maze of misshapen streets. I came across a grouping of newspaper stands. One of them had The Hippo.

    I leaned down to pick it up. This was the gag. A guy in his 20s, a film fan, bends down to take something out of a plastic box on a sidewalk. You watch him and you think it must be trash, or something more sinister, and suddenly you don’t know what this guy is up to. He steps away and you realize he has removed a newspaper. A big, floppy news-rag, with printed ink that smears his fingers and pages that threatened to blow away at the slightest breeze. He examines this paper in the sidewalk, with nobody walking past him. Completely foreign to audiences of tomorrow.

 

   Moving trains are the great recurring image in cinema. Great because they are, without much exaggeration, the first cinematic image, dating back to the Lumiere's The Arrival of a Train (1895). (More on this later?). I wanted to introduce this concept with my own train moving image, shot on my grainy iPhone on the 7 train in Queens. This is not to claim that my footage qualifies as actual cinema. It is more of a footnote; take it or leave it.