King of Kings: silent film with live music

On Sat. Nov. 7 at 7pm St. Mary’s Church, Lakeville CT, will present a screening of De Mille’s 1927 silent film, The King of Kings (155 minutes), as part of the church’s 140th anniversary celebration. All are invited, and admission is free.This is a truly extraordinary film. Great pains were taken to ensure that it met with the approval of many of the intertitles are quotes from Scripture, with chapter and verse. De Mille gave his share of earnings to charity It was shown somewhere in the world each day for decades after its release.The movie broke records for audience attendance, and free showings around the world brought the estimated audience to over a billion. In Egypt, Christians and Moslems came up to the screen on their knees to kiss the place where Jesus walked. When the Mexican government closed churches, displaced worshippers knelt and prayed in theaters showing the film.(source: https://www.cecilbdemille.com/king.html )De Mille’s film depicts the last weeks of the Christ, from his work as a carpenter to the events of the Gospels. H. B. Warner stars as Jesus in a warm, understated performance. Other cast members of note include Joseph Schildkraut and Ernest Torrence. Extras included Sally Rand, and (no relation) Ayn Rand (!) who met her future husband, Frank O’Connor, on the set. A large gate in this film was reused for King Kong and torched in the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind.King of Kings, like our trees these days, also has splashes of color, in the opening scene with Mary Magdalene (don’t miss the zebras), and the stunning Resurrection scene. Two-stripTechnicolor was rare but not impossible in the 20’s–Wikipedia lists no fewer than 50 films with at least some real color before this one. Parenthetically, I will be playing a program of some breathtakingly beautiful short color films at MoMA on Nov. 22. https://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/film_screenings/25362Here are some clips from the film with my recorded score: https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/438030/The-King-of-Kings/videos.html The music is symphonic in scope and feel. The themes date from 1985, when I scored a 12-hour dramatized reading of the entire New Testament, recorded on audio cassettes. The background music accompanied everything in the Gospels except for the Epistles, which were done by another composer. If you can’t make it to the November screening, the entire film can be seen here, from the Criterion Collection DVD release. singers in the area who are interested in participating in the brief choral sections in the performance, please reply to this email and put “Silent film singer” in the subject.Donald Sosin is one of the world’s foremost silent film musicians, performing on piano, organ, and synthesizer at major film festivals—New York, Telluride, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, TriBeCa, Denver, Virginia, and Newport—and at MoMA, BAM, the Berlin Filmmuseum, Moscow’s prestigious Lumière Gallery, and the Jecheon International Music and Film Festival in South Korea. He and his wife, singer Joanna Seaton, are favorite guest artists at the National Gallery and at Italy’s annual silent film retrospectives in Bologna and Pordenone. They have appeared at Lincoln Center, Mass MoCA, Boston’s MFA, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Tarrytown Music Hall, at Yale, Harvard, Brown and Emory Universities—and created scores for over 50 silent film DVDs on the Kino, Criterion, Milestone and other labels.Donald grew up in Rye NY and Munich, studied composition at Michigan and Columbia, and played on Broadway for many years. His music has been heard on PBS, TCM, as background for soaps on the major networks, and in many contemporary films. Donald was Minister of Music at the First Church of Christ, Congregational in Sharon CT for ten years, and has played at many other area churches and synagogues. He is currently organist and choir director at St. Mary’s. Donald and Joanna live in Lakeville and have two musical children.