MIT Office of the Arts 
by Lynn Heinemann, Office of the Arts
(Tech Talk 4/24/1996)
In this 100th anniversary year of the invention of the motion picture, Charlie Chaplin's The Circus will be shown for the first time in Boston since the late 1920s as Chaplin intended - with his original score, played by a live, ten-piece ensemble and synchronized to a print on loan from the Chaplin archives in Paris. MIT will be the site of this performance, to be presented on Sunday, April 28, 1996 at 8pm in Kresge Auditorium.
First released in 1928, The Circus is fast-paced and filled with the visual gags that have endeared Chaplin's 'Little Tramp' to audiences around the world. What makes this "Circus" different from the widely-circulated version which Chaplin re-released in 1969 are the music and the slower speed at which the film will be run. The 1928 music for The Circus is a pastiche of pre-existing works compiled, under Chaplin's supervision, by cellist and conductor Arthur Kay from the operatic, dance band, popular and incidental music of the period. The movie score displays Chaplin's and Kay's wide knowledge of music and their celebrated ability to unite music and image in ways that enhance the power and humor of the film.
Directing the orchestral accompaniment for the MIT screening will be Gillian Anderson, a noted Brookline-born conductor and musicologist who discovered the original score for The Circus in 1992 in the Chaplin home in Switzerland. Ms. Anderson, who specializes in American music and film music and has restored the scores of 19 silent feature films, will return to MIT on Tuesday, April 30, 1996 to present a free public lecture on her work from 3:30-5pm in Rm 4-364.
Associate Professor Martin Marks, MIT's resident film music scholar and an authority on silent-film music, cites the MIT presentation of The Circus as a "rare and wonderful opportunity" and the "crowning event in what seems to be a silent film renaissance in Boston."
MIT is hosting this performance through the Office of Government and Community Relations in support of a benefit to raise funds for the Hospice of Cambridge. Reserved seating tickets for the performance are $30; a limited number of student tickets are available for $15. The Council for the Arts at MIT has purchased a limited number of tickets available for MIT students at no cost. Students should come to the Office of the Arts (Rm E15-205) with their valid ID to sign up. Because of the special nature of the performance, no one can be admitted after the film has begun. For ticket or benefit information, call 491-6425.
As part of the current "Masterworks of Silent Cinema" festival at the Harvard Film Archives, Professor Marks, music consultant to the Archive, is providing piano accompaniment to silent classics through May. He'll also present free pre-screening lectures before the showing of Metropolis (1927) and Broken Blossoms (1919) to give a closer view of these films and their scores and place them in historical and cultural context. Screenings are at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (24 Quincy St.). Admission is $6, students and seniors $5. For more information, call 495- 4700.